


The Return

by lurkinglurkerwholurks



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: (Bruce's so don't worry but everyone's still working through all that), Bruce Wayne Needs a Hug, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Damian Wayne Needs a Hug, Eavesdropping, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, Family Feels, Fix-It of Sorts, Forehead Kisses, Gap Filler, Gen, Good Parent Alfred Pennyworth, Grief/Mourning, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, I don't read canon, Insomnia, Intense Yearning, It's Jason is anyone really surprised, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Platonic Cuddling, Post-Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, Rating upgraded to Teen due to brief strong language, Sickfic, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Tim Drake Angst, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Tim Drake is Red Robin, gun metaphors, my personal crack of choice: knuckle kisses, sort of in an alluded to way, wonky metaphors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:29:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 36,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23726839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkinglurkerwholurks/pseuds/lurkinglurkerwholurks
Summary: What the comics neglected to cover after Bruce returns from being lost in time.
Relationships: Alfred Pennyworth & Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth & Jason Todd, Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Cassandra Cain & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Jason Todd
Comments: 1140
Kudos: 2064





	1. Tim

The glass should have kept him anchored. Though the room was comfortable, the glass had been chilled, the temperature sending a rippling shock through his body as he pressed his hand flat against the barrier.

The chill had been a perverse comfort. It made the glass feel real, which made _him_ feel real, even if it only lasted the length of his arm.

Too little had felt real over the past six months.

The glass wasn’t cold anymore. Where it met his skin, the barrier had warmed into equilibrium, leaving him with little more than the sensation of pressure keeping him in place. Tim leaned forward and pressed his forehead against it, relishing the shiver the new sensation sent down his spine. His breath fogged the glass.

“Would you like to sit down?” Wonder Woman asked from behind.

Tim ignored her. She wasn’t the first to offer. His knees hurt, and the heels of his feet. He knew that in a distant way. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t move until the glass lifted and let him in. It was his right.

The white curtain beyond was pulled close, likely for another test. Or maybe in a futile attempt to draw him away. They underestimated him. They all underestimated him, even now.

“How much longer.” His voice was flat, inflectionless, in the way Bruce’s could be. He had learned that in the last half of the year. That and so much more.

“Soon.”

Wonder Woman again. He didn’t turn.

 ** _Soon._** A voice echoed in his skull. **_Patience._**

Tim bore it stoically, like he might rain on his face. One look. He’d only gotten one look before the curtain had blocked his view. It hadn’t been enough to steady the floating sensation in his stomach. The aches in his body were detached from him, belonging to another body entirely. He couldn’t feel his feet on the floor or his hand against the glass, or now even his forehead pressed to the same pane. He felt the same as if they had opened the Watchtower hatch and set him free in the vast black of space—freezing, numb, and devoid of all connection.

A leg pushed through the glass to Tim’s left as seamlessly as if stepping through a smooth cascade of water. The rest of the body followed until the Martian Manhunter stood looking down at him. Tim kept his eyes on the fogged view of the curtain.

“Decontamination is almost complete.” J’onn’s voice resonated in Tim’s ears and brain at the same time, tickling the way teeth did when you hummed at just the right pitch. Tim hated it, but he bore it the same way he bore everything now.

“I want time with him.” Tim lifted his head from the glass and looked to the alien beside him.

“Of course.”

“Just me,” Tim clarified. “Before you tell the others.”

J’onn’s head tilted a fraction, as if thinking, or listening.

Tim’s lips tightened. “Tell Superman,” there was venom there, a reminder and a threat, “that I’ve earned it. I get time before the hordes descend.”

A pause. Then a slow dip of the head.

“Follow me.”

Martian Manhunter walked to the far end of the glass, then stopped when Tim had not moved from his post at the glass.

_**The entrance is this way.** _

Tim followed.

At the far end of the glass was a door. On the other side of the door was a hallway, narrow, gleaming, and grey. Other doors led to other rooms, but the door three spots down was where J’onn stopped. 

“Wait here.”

And then Tim was alone in the hallway. Who knew how long they would make him wait. “Soon” was a meaningless word, even more so when stacked against six months of waiting. Maybe they would make him wait hours. Maybe they had brought him here so he couldn’t see inside, so they could clear the room through another door and leave him with empty hands. He wouldn’t think it of them normally, but… but…

But what was normal anymore?

A sick thrill shot through him, starting deep in his gut and sparking like live wire through his stomach and up into his dead-beating heart. It was startling for its existence, much less its intensity. When was the last time he had _felt_ something?

Tim shivered again, this time from the feeling. Nerves. He was nervous. He had focused on nothing but the end for months, and now that it was here, he—

The door opened. Superman filled the frame, a wall of blue and red. His eyes were soft. Tim used to think them kind, but now he just saw pity and a touch of wariness. The wariness felt good. The pity did not. 

Tim waited, close-lipped. He would not jitter, no matter how badly he wanted to see into the room beyond. Nor would he be the first to speak.

The alien broke first.

“Tim—”

“Are you going to let me in or what?”

An apology, a lecture, instructions—whatever was supposed to come next, Tim didn’t want it. Superman blinked at him. Tim stared back. Kon would’ve been impressed, probably, and pleased that the hero worship had finally worn off. If he’d still been in touch with Kon, anyways

“He’s exhausted,” was all Superman said as he stepped to the side. “Go easy.”

Tim had already stopped listening. He pushed his way into the room, dead heart restarting into a stuttering, epiliptic beat. He could feel sweat blossoming behind his ears. He was coming to life again, like a toy rewound, but it still didn’t feel real.  
He was struck with a sudden fear, fierce and fluorescent in intensity, that none of this _was_ real. That he was still falling, but the ground was coming quickly. His feet carried him toward the center of the room, smooth as a conveyor belt. The bed sat in the middle, bracketed by monitors and machines that whooshed and beeped softly, and one lone chair.

Tim stopped three yards from the bed and couldn’t make himself move forward.

_Not real, not real, not real._

The figure in the bed, black now faded grey against white sheets, stirred.

If he closed his eyes, it would all disappear. But god, he was so tired.

A rasp, not quite a name. Fingers flexing on the rail. It was enough.

“ _Bruce._ ”

Tim surged forward, stumbling over his own feet like the clumsy kid he used to be, all knobby knees and untied laces. He caught himself on the bedrail, then wrapped his hands around the fingers that reached toward him.

“You’re alive. You’re _alive._ I knew it. I knew you were.”

That was what he said, or tried to say. The words got a little lost against the boulder in his throat.

 _Go easy_ , Superman had warned, and Tim had ignored him, but he was trying, because otherwise he would squeeze Bruce’s hand until it broke.

Tim had heard the phrase “like a shadow of himself” before, but now he understood. Bruce’s hair had grown longer than Alfred would have ever allowed, waving with silver crests across sunken temples. Tim could see Bruce’s skull beneath his skin, all sunken flesh and cracked lips. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, hadn’t properly eaten in weeks. Tim could see nicks and burns across his skin, inflicted and already on their way to healing, while graver injuries hid beneath broad swaths of sterile bandages.

He looked awful. He looked wonderful.

“Tim.”

It was barely a whisper, but it brought tears to Tim’s eyes. He bent his head and pressed his lips to Bruce’s knuckles.

_Not real, not real, not real._

_Shut up._ If this wasn’t real, it didn’t matter. He would take it regardless.

“I knew you weren’t dead,” Tim mumbled again.

“Tried to get back.” Bruce shifted in the bed, weakly, as if trying to pull himself together. His voice was low like a bucket of gravel, like a bear’s growl. “Clark said you found me.”

“I’m sorry it took so long. I never stopped looking.” He’d been fooled at first, like the rest of them, but once he started, he had never stopped.

Bruce’s hand turned in Tim’s and cupped the side of his face, calloused thumb stroking gently. Tim squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to cry harder than he already was.

“Sweetheart,” Bruce rumbled, “come here.”

They had never been an overtly affectionate family. Tim had grown up in a sterile, distant home, and Bruce’s chosen gestures came as quiet praise, not physical touch. But Tim didn’t hesitate over Bruce’s command. Minding the lines and leads, he climbed over the bedrail and onto the mattress and squirmed down against Bruce’s side.

This was… He had come to Bruce a boy grown, or that’s how he had felt. Thirteen was too old for crawling into bed after a nightmare, or cuddling up to watch a movie, or riding tall on shoulders in a teeming crowd. They had never done anything like _this_ before, but somehow it felt as natural as breathing.

Tim wrapped his arms around Bruce—too easily, Bruce still broad but whittled by the time away—and buried his nose in his Bruce’s chest. He smelled of the tang of space, and of other things Tim couldn’t place, but it was still Bruce. An arm wrapped across his back, heavy in its bonelessness, then tightening across his spine in a clinging hug.

“I have questions,” Bruce said slowly. His chest hummed beneath Tim’s head, like the purr of a big cat. “But I think I… I need to rest.”

That was fine. Bruce had to be shattered, and he would need his strength when the others appeared. This was enough—getting to see him, getting to touch him and know he was _real_ and not stoppered in an alabaster jar of dust. Tim hugged Bruce a moment longer, then pulled back to push himself up.

Bruce’s arm tightened, muscles banding across Tim’s back. “Stay?”

So Tim stayed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternate title: Heck It All.
> 
> Because my brain is ANGRY and I can't figure out where the rest of this is. There IS MORE COMING, but the world is fighting me. I would recommend keeping an eye out, because I don't know if the next section is a chapter or a related fic, so just bear with me.
> 
> In the meantime, you can have this piece, because I need the dopamine and y'all need the knuckle kisses. (Okay, I _also_ need the knuckle kisses.)
> 
> ETA: The spiritual predecessor to this work can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22206673


	2. Bruce

Bruce woke to a dry mouth. The inside of his lips stuck to his teeth and his tongue clung to his upper palate. He frowned, wondering why that was the first thing he noticed. Then he realized the fear was gone, that rabbit’s foot rat-a-tat-tatting of not knowing where he was or what he would open his eyes to see. That fear had plagued him for an eternity, though eons and ages, across space and time, precisely because he _was_ moving across space and time.

But not now. Not here, despite not knowing where here was.

The air smelled of… space, that gunpowder flash. Or maybe real gunpowder. That was possible, too. There was a thin pillow beneath his head, and a mattress beneath his back. A real mattress, by the feel of it. And something heavy across his chest.

Bruce opened one eye, and then the other. His vision was eclipsed by a dark head of hair.

 _That one’s mine._ The answer pinged deep in his chest. That was one of his, one of his boys.

_I made it. I’m home._

He blinked up at the ceiling he now recognized as the Watchtower’s sickbay, content to count rivets as his eyes ran clean of sleep.

Once his tears had dried sticky on his cheeks, Bruce sniffed once and lowered his chin. Tim. He recognized the head now, or always had but could at last put a name to it beyond a feeling.

Bruce bent his neck, grimacing only slightly at the strain, and pressed his lips to Tim’s scalp. His boy’s hair smelled like artificial wildflowers, but his skin was warm and the strands were soft.

Tim shifted, curling sleepily into the touch. Bruce smiled, an unfamiliar expression that made his mouth feel rusty at the hinges. He wasn’t sure where the rest of the family was but assumed they would be in soon. Until then, he was content where he was.

Another subtle movement, this time longer with muscles trembling into the stretch. Then blue eyes lifted to meet Bruce’s. They were red-rimmed. He remembered, distantly, Tim crying by his bed.

“You’re real.” Tim’s voice was low with sleep and whisper soft.

Bruce brushed back strands out of Tim’s face to see him better. He had missed this face. It had kept him going, this face and the others.

“I think so.” He had been lost in time and then to time. He hadn’t felt wholly real in quite a while. “How long was I gone?”

Clark had told him the year, the same he had left, but Bruce wanted to hear it again. Independent confirmation was important.

“Six months and fourteen days.” Tim’s answer was immediate.

Six months. Less than it had seemed, but still a stinging slap in the face. Over half a year away.

Bruce sucked in a slow breath through his nose, then grimaced at the twinge it sent through cartilage not quite healed.

“Long time.”

“Yeah,” Tim whispered.

Bruce took a closer look at him now, with the absence in mind. He didn’t think it was a trick of the eye that Tim seemed older, with a portion of his boyish softness sloughed away. He was lean, almost bordering on haggard, with a thin but deep crease between his brows that didn’t fade even as Bruce rubbed his thumb against it. Bruce’s thumb worried the furrow a moment more, then tapped against the pink slash of healing skin next to Tim’s right eye.

“This is new.” A slight hesitation, a question without enough of an uptick to be a question.

Tim had closed his eyes again, content as a cat in the sun. “Yes.”

Bruce ghosted a fingertip over the bridge of his nose, tracing the unexpected shape. “Did you break this recently?”

“Mm.”

“I thought I taught you how to duck.”

“S’fine. We match.”

It wasn’t like Tim to be sloppy. All of his kids could take a punch. That was the nature of their job, their life, but Tim was cerebral in his fights, and tenacious. It must have been quite an opponent to catch him square across the face like that.

Bruce dragged his hand up Tim’s face and into his hair, pushing it back and combing through the strands. “You need a haircut.”

“Br _uce_ ,” Tim huffed, but his lips twitched fondly. “Please. Already? You just got back.”

“Because of you.” He remembered that, Clark saying that Tim was the one who had refused to believe he was dead and had found him in the end.

Dead. Gone and buried for six months. Bruce could only imagine what that must have been like for his family. They all had already suffered so much loss.

“Is… How is… everyone?”

Booster hadn’t said when he first appeared. Bruce thought he remembered asking the others as they gathered him up onto the bed, but he couldn’t remember the answer. Had he forgotten because all was well? Or because nothing was?

Bruce’s hand stilled in Tim’s hair.

“Fine,” Tim said, stumbling into the delay. “Everyone’s fine.”

There was a feeling in the back of Bruce’s brain, a suspicion, like a snake uncurling to flick its tongue out, to test the air. There was something Tim wasn’t telling him, something wrong.

But then Tim repeated the reassurance and began to pull away, and Bruce was… afraid. Afraid to know, and to lose his moment of peace before knowing. And whatever it was, he had to trust Tim not to lie to him. He had to believe that everyone was fine.

“Okay,” Bruce murmured and let his head fall back against the pillow.

“Really,” Tim repeated, tone steadier this time. “Everyone’s fine. I mean. Considering we thought…”

That he was dead. Bruce pressed his lips to Tim’s hair again and enjoyed the pleased confusion of his boy’s answering hum.

“I’m sorry I put you all through that,” he murmured, word muffled by hair and scalp.

“Not your fault.” Tim was sinking into him again, wary muscles slowly relaxing into limp contentment.

They had never done this before. Why had they never done this before? Dick used to laze with him on the couch all the time, flopping dramatically over Bruce’s legs while puzzling out homework or curled pressed to Bruce’s side while Bruce read to him. And sometimes they would recline together, just like this, doing nothing at all. Jason less so, but Jason had been older, more independent, and even he had loafed about with Bruce from time to time. And Cass, Cass was a little burr.

Never Tim, though. A mistake on Bruce’s part. One he now had a chance to rectify, along with a million other little things he thought he would never be able to do again.

If he couldn’t press more about the family, he could ask in other ways. “Tell me what I’ve missed?”

It took time. Bruce was still gathering strength, having drained himself dry in his fight to return. He found himself nodding off, drifting only to return with a sharp jerk of his neck. Tim waited patiently for him every time, either still pressed against his chest or curled by his side. Tim himself wasn’t moving quickly either. He picked his way slowly through the past six months, crafting a narrative of his search for Bruce. It was a landscape in lace, beautiful but full of holes. Bruce tracked the mentions of the others—too few, far too few—enough to know they were indeed alive. And he listened to Tim step around gaping sinkholes in his narrative enough to wager that some of the omissions were because of modesty, but the rest was… what? It felt almost defensive, though of himself or of Bruce or of others, Bruce couldn’t be sure. He wouldn’t be sure until he was home again.

Bruce tousled Tim’s hair fondly and pressed one more quick kiss to his forehead, a self-indulgence after an eon of deprivation, then called to the ceiling, “Clark?”

A soft click from the overhead speaker, breaking the charade of privacy.

“Bring me some clothes.”

* * *

It had been more of a fight than he expected—not from Clark, but from Tim. Clark’s protests Bruce had expected. The Kent line mother-henned well, and Clark’s own invulnerabilities meant he tended to treat his unpowered friends—Bruce in particular—with the care of finely spun glass when he was reminded of their shortcomings. As impatient as Bruce was, he knew his absence hadn’t been tough for his family alone.

Tim though, Tim was the insistent one. Tim was the one who fretted over his readouts, who tried to keep his clothes away, who fussed and stewed and hovered. This wasn’t completely new. In their beginnings, when Bruce had dropped into the deep pit of his own sorrows and Tim had been the rope to pull him out, their relationship had been inverted much like this.

Bruce let Tim fuss silently and with more than a little gruff fondness, but he still dressed himself and carefully picked the leads off his chest and pulled the lines from his veins. At last, he rested a hand on his son’s shoulder, cutting off the latest protest.

“Come on,” Bruce murmured. “Let’s go home.”

He expected Tim to soften, perhaps even lean against him a little. Each of his children were cyphers in their own way, with intricacies and enigmatic responses that continually caught him off guard, but they had their own well-worn paths as well. Tim’s secret was that he loved hearing the Manor referred to as _home_.

But instead of the warmth Bruce expected, a strange look crossed Tim’s face, a broad and conflicting mess of emotions flashing like bird wings startled from the brush. Bruce couldn’t parse what he saw, each furrow and dip and flicker a notation in a language he didn’t know how to read. All he knew was that when Tim smiled, it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Yeah,” Tim said quietly, “home.”

They left the medbay and joined the rest of the Watchtower at the zeta. The crowd that had greeted Bruce when he and Booster first arrived had thinned in the waning hours, so it was only Clark and Diana that stood guard. Bruce kept a hand on Tim's shoulder, for balance and reassurance, and could feel his son straighten under the regard of the others.

"Bruce, are you sure you should leave so quickly?" Diana asked.

"I'll rest better at home," Bruce replied. Now that he was upright, he could feel his heart straining like a dog on a leash. He was in the right time at last, but still in the wrong place.

"You need monitoring," Clark began, but Bruce cut him off.

"I need to see my family." He didn't know why they weren't here. Protocol, perhaps, the need to keep the Watchtower a place for defense instead of reunions. Alfred would never travel via zeta, anyways, so maybe the others waited on his behalf, knowing Bruce wouldn't stay away any longer than he must.

Clark's jaw flexed unhappily, but he nodded. He, more than anyone else in the League with the exception of J'onn, knew what being separated from his kids did to Bruce.

"We'll need to work on your report once you're feeling better," Clark said instead, voice soft but insistent. "I'll coordinate with Alfred next week."

The last thing on Bruce's mind now was a report, but he wrote the protocol that demanded it, so he could hardly protest now. Besides, it would do Clark good to check in, and that wasn't something he wished to fight either.

Bruce nodded and reached with his free hand. Diana covered his hand with both of hers, while Clark ignored the handshake and instead ducked under Bruce's other side to help him to the zeta.

Tim shied away, pulling Bruce with him. "I've got him."

There was an exchange Bruce couldn't quite catch, a flashing of eyes and thinning of lips, but Clark was the one to concede as Tim's arm tightened around Bruce's waist. Clark stepped back, but not before giving Bruce another quick hug. Bruce doubted the report would wait the full week.

“Thank you,” Bruce told them as Tim walked him to the tube. “And thank Booster as well.”

Bruce’s heart thundered with anticipation as he stepped into the narrow tube. Home, home, home, soon he would be home. His last sight was of Tim watching him from the other side of the glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't want to make promises I can't keep, so I'm not going to update the chapter count to a ?. Just know I'm still working, and we'll see what comes. The tentative goal is a chapter a week until we hit the end. Whatever that end is. But each will be structured like these two, where each end can be The End in case I need to stop.


	3. Bruce, continued

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He was doing this. He was walking in his own home again, in his own time. There was no need to run. No need to hide. He wasn’t going to be hunted or ripped away or thrown headlong into oblivion. It was real and Bruce forced himself to focus on the way the wallpaper felt beneath his fingertips and the hardwood beneath his socked feet to chase away the disbelieving numbness._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I upset myself a bit in part of this. Just FYI.
> 
> Also, my current thesis statement is Bruce calls his children "sweetheart" _and_ sometimes "love" because that's what his parents and Alfred used, respectively.

The sensation of the zeta was too familiar, too similar to the delayed echo-snap of time travel. Every time Bruce was flung through time, he felt the disassociation of his consciousness and body separating, stretching, duplicating like ripples in fog. He had grown sick on it, miserable and depleted with each new ricochet through time.

The trip from the Watchtower to the Cave was nearly instantaneous, no more than a blink. Bruce had to remain in the zeta-tube for a moment longer, drawing in long, slow breaths through his nose to convince his head and heart of what he would open his eyes to see. Not a strange land. Not a lost time. Home.

One more breath.

Bruce opened his eyes, and there it was.

Bruce stepped out into the dry chill of the Cave. It smelled the same—concrete and guano and industrial cleaner and tire rubber—and sounded the same with the distant squeak of bats and the hum of machinery. Above him, a red light flashed silently, sending an alert up into the house.

The door at the top of the stairs was flung open and banged against the wall. Bruce and his eldest stared at each other from their respective distances, and then the distance dropped to a matter of feet in seconds as Dick cleared the stairs and stood before him, blue eyes blown wide.

He looked like he had seen a ghost, which, Bruce supposed, was somewhat accurate.

“When I was seven and came here, my first pair of pajamas that you bought me, what was on them?” Dick asked, breathless and intense.

Bruce frowned, thrown by the unorthodox greeting and by the need to fumble blindly back into his own dim memories.

“You were eight,” he corrected slowly, “and Alfred bought them. They were solid blue. You pretended to like them. You liked the next pair, with elephants, better.”

Bruce grunted as Dick launched himself forward with the same determined abandon of his childhood, their bodies colliding together. Bruce had to stagger back a step to regain his balance, but their arms were already wrapping around each other. This was the hug Bruce knew well, knew best. He closed his eyes and breathed.

“Sorry,” Dick rasped, face half-buried in Bruce’s shoulder. “We’ve had some security issues. I had to be sure.”

Bruce didn’t know what that meant. Six months away, he was sure there was a lot he didn’t know. It didn’t matter right now. He cupped the back of his son’s head and held him tightly before planting a kiss to Dick’s temple.

Dick had been just a little boy with wide, cornflower eyes and a powder-keg temper when he first came to the Manor. Bruce could still remember his exact height, curly head barely reaching Bruce’s waist. Now he was so grown, a man with a big heart to match, but still too young to lose another father.

“I’m sorry I was away for so long,” Bruce murmured.

Dick held him and let himself be held for a moment longer, then pulled back with a wet sniff. “Not your fault. I’m glad you’re back.”

Behind Dick, hovering out of reach with arms crossed, stood another little boy, but his hair was thick and wavy instead of gently curled, and his eyes were green. Bruce realized with a guilty twist in his stomach that he hadn’t given much thought to his youngest in his time away.

He hadn’t _forgotten_ Damian, of course not. But they had been new to each other when Bruce went away, new and wary of what the other meant, despite being linked by blood. Bruce had yet to accustom himself to having this child in his world, much less be able to contemplate what that child’s world would be like without Bruce in it.

“Father,” Damian greeted with a slight lift of his chin. “You look horrible.”

Dick snorted, one arm still looped comfortably around Bruce’s waist.

“But it is well you have returned,” Damian finished, stiffness turning in the light to limn brittle.

“Thank you.” Bruce kept his voice deep and solemn, guessing—correctly, he hoped—that the strange little boy before him might appreciate the esteem more than the affection. Neither moved to hug the other.

Bruce kept his arm around Dick’s shoulder, both for the proximity and to keep himself upright as he looked past Damian.

“Alfred is waiting for you upstairs,” Dick explained, apologetic for the reduced greeting.

That didn’t surprise Bruce, nor did the lack of a third, broad-shouldered boy. Some part of him had secretly hoped Jason might come, but even that quiet part had known it was an empty hope. He would have to seek out his son later, on his own and in his own time. But Jason wasn’t the only missing greeting.

“Cassandra?” Bruce asked as he searched the empty space for a slender girl with soft, dancing eyes. Where was his daughter?

“She, uh, left.”

“Left?” Bruce echoed dumbly. His arm dropped from Dick’s shoulder. His eldest wouldn’t meet his gaze.

“Before the… before the service,” Dick explained, carefully sidestepping _funeral_.

Six months ago. _And you let her go?_

Some of Bruce’s horror must have shown on his face, because Dick’s jaw tightened and he added, “We tracked her down, B. She was clear. She didn’t want to come back. Not without you here.”

Why? Why would she leave? This was her home. Bruce had been clear, this was her _home_ , her family. Cassandra had spent too much of her life alone. She should have been here, with her family, even if that meant without Bruce. Especially if it meant without Bruce.

She would come back. He was back, so she would come back, and he would talk to her and they would fix whatever made her leave in the first place. Bruce forced himself to breathe, aware of both Dick and Damian watching him closely. He nodded, and even managed to relax his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said again, echoing his earlier words. “I can’t imagine the last six months have been easy for any of you.”

He was standing in reserves, propped upright by sheer stubbornness of will. Zetas turned him inside out even on good days. The bed in the Watchtower seemed like a lifetime ago. He didn’t wobble, but Dick seemed to know, as he always did, and slipped a steadying arm around Bruce’s waist.

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t leave. You were taken. And you’re back now.” Dick’s arm tightened, and he didn’t seem inclined to let go any time soon. Bruce wouldn’t have let him, even if he were. “Come on. Let’s get you upstairs.”

Bruce went under his own power, slowly, but able to pretend that his arm draped around Dick’s shoulders was for companionship alone. Maybe it was. Dick had gotten broader in the last six months. Not noticeably so—Dick was still trim like a swimmer, like his own parents—but the bulk was new enough that Bruce noticed the definition. There was more for him to notice in all of them, he was sure, but Bruce chose not to look yet.

The Cave was his home, and stepping into it had been important, a press against the door of the last six months, but stepping through the clock to the study was something else entirely. There were no changes—not no changes that he could tell, but no changes at all. It was as if he had never left, and the solidness of it felt like an embrace. This was his father’s desk, his desk, in his study, in his home.

He was home.

Bruce was struck with the urge to tour the entire house, to lay his hands on every inch of this place he had learned to love and hate and love and hate. Ghosts lived here, but memories too, and he was relieved to find himself among the latter.

But the tour, he realized abruptly, would have to wait. Dick guided him to the study sofa before his creaking knees could give way completely.

“Why don’t you rest here for a bit?” Dick offered, one hand still on Bruce’s back.

“I’m—”

“Clark said not to let you push too hard,” Dick continued, then added, “and it’ll give us time to get everything straightened.”

The former wasn’t a persuasive argument, but the latter was enough of an excuse for Bruce to nod and slump back against the cushions. What needed to be straightened or why it wasn’t straightened in the hours since he had returned didn’t seem important enough to be asked. Sitting felt better than it should have.

Dick ducked forward and kissed Bruce’s forehead, Damian gave him a nod, and then the study was empty except for the soft ticking of the clock on the desk.

Bruce didn’t remember slumping down. Didn’t remember falling asleep at all, until suddenly he was awake again and staring at the faded Bugs Bunny sticker affixed to the side of the desk. It would have been out of sight to anyone standing in the room, tucked beneath the lip of the edge and visible only to someone very small or crouched very low. Bruce couldn’t remember having noticed it before, though it likely had been there for decades, as much of a fixture in the room as the desk or the grandfather clock. A mark of Dick’s presence, he decided, from that narrow but vividly awful window of time when the boy had been obsessed with cartoons and mimicking the laugh of one Woodrow Woodpecker.

He stared at that sticker for a time, too hazy to consider getting up just yet. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed—if Dick and Damian had just left or had been gone for hours or were already back. But there was an ache in his bones that was growing, far deeper and more persistent that arthritis or bruised muscles. He needed to tend to it, and waiting was not an option.

Bruce grunted as he sat up, then again as he pushed himself to his feet. He was pleased to find he was steadier than before. The hand he kept against the wallpapered hallway felt more like a caress hello to a home well-missed than a necessity. 

He was doing this. He was walking in his own home again, in his own time. There was no need to run. No need to hide. He wasn’t going to be hunted or ripped away or thrown headlong into oblivion. It was real and Bruce forced himself to focus on the way the wallpaper felt beneath his fingertips and the hardwood beneath his socked feet to chase away the disbelieving numbness.

Bruce followed the hall through the house. He didn’t know how he knew where to go. Instinct, perhaps. But he didn’t falter as his feet led him through the Manor to the kitchen.

Alfred stood at the sink, cuffs rolled to his elbows and arms plunged into sudsy water. He was, Bruce suspected, deep in thought, since Alfred was not humming beneath breath as he worked, and the motions as he scrubbed at the dish in his hand were a little too forceful.

Bruce should go to him, right now, and hug him from behind like a gangly teen coming home for Thanksgiving. But he found he couldn’t move. Instead, Bruce leaned against the doorframe and watched. From behind, this could be the Alfred of a year past, or a decade. It was the same gently silvered hair, the same sloping shoulders, the same button-up dress shirt tucked into belted and pressed trousers.

Bruce knew, cognitively, that Alfred changed with the rest of them. The few photos the butler had allowed himself to be captured in through the years confirmed it, as did the rare moments when Bruce allowed himself to notice the thickening silver, the deepening wrinkles, the darkening liver spots. Every time, his heart caught in his chest. Except for those moments, Alfred remained the same, yesterday, today, and forever. But still Bruce could not step forward.

Shy, Bruce realized after a moment of hesitant introspection. He felt shy. Not anxious or apprehensive, but… bashful. It was an unusual feeling, but not unfamiliar. He had hovered much in the same way after returning to Gotham the first time, wary and unsure of his welcome after disappearing for several years with little warning. The difference then was, despite his reticence, Bruce had been a young man still wrapped in the benevolent selfishness of youth. He had feared Alfred’s reaction without thinking too closely about the _why_ of it.

Now Bruce was a man full-grown, and a father himself. He knew how it felt to bury a child.

“If you are going to hover like a hobgoblin, the least you could do is start drying.” Alfred’s voice was clear and crisp, not raised or heated, but enunciated clearly to carry even with his back turned.

Bruce was aware that he was shuffling forward like a little boy, and not even his lingering weakness could be fully blamed. He plucked the towel from the oven drawer and fought not to wring it in nervous hands as he lined up at the counter.

The kitchen was quiet. Bruce could hear the hum of the fridge and the slosh of the dishwater and the far-off chirps of birds in the yard. Alfred said nothing more, so neither did he. A plate passed between them, from hand to hand with no contact between, and then a saucer, a cup, another plate.

When Alfred finally spoke, his words were a mere murmur, as if he were completely alone in the room. “When you were a boy, you used to hide pennies about the house, do you remember? I would find them in the strangest places. I thought it was a sly joke of yours, a way to make sure I was cleaning properly or some such thing.”

Bruce did remember that. The motivations were foggy, as many things were from that age. He had been so lost then, aware of settling into a new normal without his parents but unable to properly comprehend what that normal would be. His world had shrunk to Alfred and to his grief. Even now, they were his two constants. But, if he crouched down and folded himself into that young, clouded mind, Bruce thought he recollected the small, gleaming joy of saying hello by hiding a penny for Pennyworth.

“I still found them years later,” Alfred was saying. “When you were away, off overseas, I would find a penny and tell myself it meant you were thinking of me, wherever you were.”

He huffed, as if embarrassed of his own sentimentality. Bruce’s throat felt curiously tight.

“We placed a stone off the garden path, next to your parents’. Unmarked, in case of visitors.” Alfred had stopped washing, his gaze on the murky water as he gripped the counter’s edge. “I thought it might be a comfort to… to have you near. I would walk out to it whenever I found a penny.”

Alfred turned to Bruce then. It was the first time Bruce had seen his face in six months and fourteen days.

“I buried you.” Alfred’s face was a worn map of cares, aggrieved and familiar. Bruce had known every line before he left. There were new ones now. “I took what was left of you, I washed you, I clothed you, I held you, and I buried you.”

“I know,” Bruce whispered. And he did. More than anyone else could, he _knew_.

There was a moment, suspended crystalline in the air, where they stared at each other, and there was a chance that they might turn back to their chore. That was their relationship, after all—rife with things never said, that may never _need_ to be said. Then the moment shattered against the certainty that, of those many things that might remain safely unacknowledged, this was not one.

Bruce reached for the man who raised him even as his own expression wobbled and broke.

“I’m sorry, Alf,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

He could feel Alfred trembling in his arms, the old butler’s hand quivering as it cupped the back of his head. Bruce felt like a child again, struggling not to hiccup in his caretaker’s arms after some awful nightmare. No, worse, because it was a nightmare they had both suffered.

“I’m okay.” The assurance burst forth in a hushed babble, because Bruce could see the Cave and his body laid out on a slab. He could see Alfred graveside at the funeral, dressed in mourner’s black yet again. He could see it, and he couldn’t shake the images. “I’m okay. I’m here. I’m home. I didn’t die, not even a little. I’m so sorry.”

Alfred shushed him, hand squeezing the back of his neck, so Bruce subsided. They stood together for some time, Bruce bent and huddled into Alfred, Alfred with his head against Bruce’s chest, their arms around each other. Bruce breathed deeply and could feel his heartrate slow a little. He forgot, until he was away, how tied to home the smell of Alfred’s aftershave was.

Neither of them, as far as he was aware, cried, though there was some surreptitious thumbing of the eyes as they separated. Before Bruce could go far, Alfred gave him a tug. Bruce bent obediently, ducking down again so Alfred could press dry, cool lips to his forehead.

“It is good to have you home, love,” Alfred murmured.

“It’s good to _be_ home,” Bruce replied, straightening enough to return the gesture.

“We’ll have your favorites tonight,” Alfred decided, then reached up to comb the hair back from Bruce’s forehead. “After you are given a decent cut and shave.”

“ _Alfred_ ,” Bruce fussed fondly, but the mention of a haircut returned him to present concerns. He looked about the empty kitchen. “I dozed by accident in the study. Any idea where the boys are?”

“I believe they are upstairs, airing out your room,” Alfred replied. He reached into the sink and let loose the drain. He was careful not to look at Bruce as he added, “And likely putting fresh linens on the bed. Master Dick has taken to sleeping in your bed.”

On bad nights, he meant. Bruce’s heart ached. Eager for a distraction, he rolled the tension out of his neck. “I didn’t hear Tim come in from downstairs. Is he in his room?”

He couldn’t imagine all three boys working together upstairs. Last he remembered, Damian and Tim had been on uncertain terms. Then again, six months was a long time, and trauma had a way of changing things.

Alfred looked up from the plates he had begun to stack. “You saw Master Timothy?”

Bruce’s brows furrowed. “Yes. He was in the Watchtower when I was brought in. Clark said he found me.”

The lines around Alfred’s mouth deepened as he smiled, but the expression didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’m glad. That boy was indefatigable in his search for you. He was convinced you were alive.” The smile faded. “I am afraid he was alone in that conviction, and it made for a very solitary experience.”

“No one could have known,” Bruce assured weakly. He blamed none of them, but he couldn’t see how this answered his question. Or he could, if he looked hard enough, but he didn’t want to.

“Perhaps not.” Alfred’s lips pressed together as he weighed his next words, but before he could speak, a call came from down the corridor.

“B?” There was the thunder of pounding feet and then, “Alfred, have you seen—” Dick’s head popped around the corner and caught sight of Bruce. A smile warm as the dawning sun spread across his face. “There you are. We went back for you and you were gone.”

“Your room is just as you left it, Father,” Damian chimed in. He had appeared at Dick’s elbow, arms folded at ease behind his back. Tim was not with them.

There was that feeling again, that bird-wing heart flutter that warned of unspoken changes, of hidden faultlines shifting beneath his feet. Whatever Tim had refused to tell him, it was tangled up in… whatever this was. 

_I just got home,_ Bruce thought desperately.

But there was more concern here than just Tim’s absence. It was the worry on Dick’s face when he had rounded the corner, before he had seen that Bruce was present and well. It was the wary distance Damian continued to give him, careful to keep Dick positioned between him and Bruce. It was the tremor in Alfred’s hand and the moisture at the corner of his eyes.

Bruce thought it unfair that he had been nearly drowned in an excess of time, when now there was too little to tend to his family.

Dick was waiting, face bright and expectant, so Bruce followed the boys up the stairs. No one offered to help him, for which he was grateful, but he could feel the heavy thudding of his heart against the muscles of his chest by the time they reached the second floor.

“Everything’s the way you left it,” Dick promised as they stepped into the room, and his promise rang true. Bruce’s room looked as if he had been away this morning. The curtains were pulled back, letting in the late afternoon light, and the carpet smelled freshly washed. The far door to the adjoined bathroom was open. Dick gestured toward it.

“I went ahead and put in fresh towels. I thought you might want to shower.” Dick’s smile was soft and fond, his nose wrinkling. “You still smell like space.”

“A shower would be nice,” Bruce conceded, his mind already navigating three steps ahead.

“After your shower, a shave and a haircut,” Alfred reminded him from just outside the bedroom doorway. “It will do wonders for making you feel like yourself again.”

“Of course.”

Still they lingered, pressing upon him a hug (Dick), a squeeze to the shoulder (Alfred), a nod (Damian), and trailing looks as if expecting him to disappear the moment his feet crossed the threshold from carpet to bathroom tile. Bruce shut the door with a fond smile, then waited in the bathroom until he was sure his room was empty.

His phone had been destroyed in the explosion, Bruce was sure. It certainly hadn’t fallen through time with him. But a second phone, a burner rarely used, sat in the back of his sock drawer. He pulled it out now and dialed the number from memory.

It rang. And rang. And rang. There was no personalized recording at the end, but when the beep sounded, Bruce spoke.

“Tim? It’s me.” Worry, repressed in front of the others, now bubbled and burned in his throat. “I...” _Where are you? I thought you were following me back? What aren’t you telling me?_ “Call me when you get this.”

Bruce ended the call with a frustrated jab of his thumb and tossed the phone onto the bathroom counter. He listened for the ring while he showered. It never came.


	4. Bruce, continued again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Moved out._
> 
> _Bruce stared at the night-black ceiling and jabbed at the words again, like sticking a finger in a wound._
> 
> _Moved out._
> 
> _Tim._
> 
> _Moved out._

Moved out.

Bruce stared at the night-black ceiling and jabbed at the words again, like sticking a finger in a wound.

Moved out.

Tim.

Moved out.

There was a bedroom down the hall. Its door was closed. If Bruce got up right now and opened the door, the room would be empty. He had done it already, while Dick and Damian were on patrol. He’d needed to see for himself.

Even at a glance, Bruce had known. Tim was a messy boy. Though restrained and carefully neat in his own way, he exerted control over his chosen spaces by being completely _un_ restrained. His room at the Drakes’ had been a pigsty, a state Bruce had unconsciously attributed to neglect and lack of care, especially when contrasted with the pin-straight condition of Tim’s new room in the Manor. But the longer Tim stayed, the messier his Manor room became. Bruce couldn’t say when he had pieced it together. He just knew that one day, he had started seeing Tim’s room through his boy’s eyes, and every riotous splash of clothing on the floor, every crumpled piece of paper, every precarious stack of books, every gnarled mess of wires became a declaration.

_This space is mine, my own, and I fill it with me._

The room was empty now. The furniture was still there, the bed carefully made, the bookshelf full of books and figurines and disc cases, and framed prints still hung on the walls. It looked like Tim might come back any moment, if Tim were any other boy. But there were no balled socks scattered across the floor, no half-empty mugs cooling on the desk, no backpack with its contents spilling onto the rug.

The room was empty of Tim.

Bruce had sat on the bed and tried to call his son again. And again, Tim didn’t pick up.

Home. He had told Tim they were going home. He had meant _their_ home, and Tim hadn’t said a word. He just… hadn’t followed.

And Bruce didn’t know _why_. They had told him over dinner, after hours of silent fretting on Bruce’s part, as if Alfred’s rules of civility might protect them all and keep him calm. And perhaps there was some magic in that still, because Bruce could only listen in stunned silence to the piecemeal explanation.

A fight, Dick had said. A disagreement over decisions made, heightened tempers, emotions still frayed raw from mourning. There was more. Bruce knew there was more. He was presumed-dead-actually-alive, not actually dead. His perceptive skills weren’t gone. Which also meant he noticed the dark shadows under Dick’s eyes and the pensive crease in his brow. He noticed the intense stillness with which Damian listened, for once not daring to interject his opinion. He noticed how Alfred didn’t remain in the room.

There was more, but the last six months was a minefield, and Bruce didn’t know where he dared to step.

So here he was. Alive. Home. And unable to sleep.

Bruce hadn’t fought to join patrol tonight. He was stubborn, not stupid. Six months away would mean changes for Gotham as well, changes he would need to learn before he shadowed her streets again. Besides, his body still felt fragile, like a step ready to fracture under too much weight.

The boys were home. Bruce heard them come up the stairs not too long ago and whisper their goodnights to each other. That eased some of the static in his bones, but not all. He didn’t know what bruises they bore, what dangers they had risked to protect their city. That they were alive would have to be enough.

It was not enough that they were only two.

Bruce considered his silent phone again, then rejected the impulse to pluck it from his bedside stand. He had left too many messages already. One more would not tip the balance in his favor.

The house was quiet now, not just hushed but truly still. The downstairs computers were asleep, the comms muted, the streets emptied. Alfred would be abed, perhaps only just awake as he read a chapter by lamplight, but soon ready to roll over and slumber. The boys, having showered downstairs, would be asleep as soon as they hit their mattresses. Patrol, even on a slow night, was exhausting.

He was exhausted. But still he couldn’t sleep.

Bruce didn’t know how long he stared up at his ceiling, still frustrated he was awake, still awed he was here at all, when the doorway filled with shadow. He had left the door agape just a crack, long habit from years of parenthood. A closed door meant _do not disturb_ , but some nights were too harrowing to face alone. But it had been a long time since anyone had darkened his doorway.

He propped himself up on one elbow, squinting at the familiar silhouette. “Dick? Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” came the whispered response. “Sorry, B. Go back to sleep.”

“Wasn’t sleeping.” Bruce grunted as he sat up more fully. His shoulders had stiffened during his crash-nap in the study, and they complained now as he tried to catch a look at his son’s face. “It’s the bed, I think.”

The shadow pushed open the door a little. “What about the bed?”

“Too soft,” Bruce admitted. “I had the same problem after coming back from abroad.”

Abroad meaning his travels to “find himself” that had led to him becoming the person who would become Batman. Bruce had spent that time backpacking around the world, which meant many nights spent on benches or caves or forest floors. Much like his time spent hurtling through the eras, now that he thought about it. No wonder his mattress felt wrong.

“It feels… strange, being back.” Bruce hadn’t meant to confess that, but it now hung in the dark, glinting like a lure for the figure in the doorway.

“Does it?” Dick asked.

“A little.” Bruce leaned back against the headboard and sighed again.

“Would you like to talk about it?” Dick offered as he came a half-step closer.

“Would you like to sit down?” Bruce offered in return.

When he was a boy, after a nightmare, Dick would run to Bruce’s room and throw himself on the bed. Bruce had caught many an errant elbow or knee to the side in those days, but he hadn’t minded. And then there were the mornings when, after a peaceful night apart, Dick would come shuffling in, fist crammed into one sleepy eye, and haul himself up onto the bed to curl up next to Bruce, content as a cat in the sunbeam. Both behaviors had tapered off dramatically in Dick’s adolescence without disappearing entirely. But it had been years since Dick had lived in the Manor.

There was no catapulting this time, nor a sleepy shuffle. Dick’s feet were silent as he crossed the rug, but Bruce could see the outline of his bowed shoulders even in the moonlit dim. The edge of the mattress dipped under Dick’s weight, and then he swung his legs up to sit against the headboard, parallel with Bruce.

That was a man’s profile in his periphery. Bruce didn’t think he would ever grow accustomed to it. He always expected to turn and see a little boy, his boy, with wild hair and a cheeky grin. 

“What was it like?” Dick asked into the dark. He wasn’t looking at Bruce. It was easier for Bruce to talk to Dick openly than any of his other children (with Cass he didn’t need to talk at all), but that was partly because Dick knew the cheats. Dick knew how to let Bruce breathe, to let him duck away from the weight of an unblinking focus.

“What?” Bruce asked. He knew.

“Being... gone.”

Bruce took a breath. Someone like Clark could have found the right word—right words, even, to encapsulate the experience, to make it ring true. To take all the fear and pain and exhaustion and despair and make it seem like a victory. Bruce could barely even think about it at all. Time had collapsed around him, experiences like a smeared, psychedelic whirlpool. Gazing into it again made him nauseated.

But Dick was waiting, and the longer the silence pooled, the deeper it felt.

“Lonely,” Bruce said at last, and was surprised to feel the word ring full and clear in his chest. It was the right word, or a right word, at least. “It was lonely.”

Being alone, in danger, and on the run was infinitely worse knowing that his family was waiting. Knowing that he might not ever make it back to them. It wasn’t dying that had frightened him. Bruce had spent his whole life preparing to die. No, he had been terrified of letting his family down, of leaving them to face the world alone.

Dick made a noise deep in his throat like a scoff, but when Bruce turned to look at him, his face was in his hands.

“Chum?” Bruce’s fingertips were on Dick’s wrist. “Dick, sweetheart. Talk to me.”

Dick sucked in a ragged breath but did not drop his hands, choosing instead to speak muffled through pressed palms. “I thought you were gone. I watched you _die_.”

Bruce knew this, but hearing it aloud felt like a mule-kick to the chest. His disappearance had been a strangely silent affair, snatched away as he had been a blink before the explosion. But now, with his son by his side, he could imagine hearing Dick scream as he had ringside all those years ago.

“I thought…” Dick audibly swallowed. “And then it was just me. Damian and planning the funeral and the cowl and WE and my job and… and I couldn’t…”

Bruce waited, breath caught in his chest, wrapped like tissue paper around his breaking heart.

“I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was handling it. I _had_ to handle it, because it was just me. I thought you were dead, Bruce.” Dick dropped his hands and looked at him then, face stricken but strangely dry.

“I know,” Bruce murmured. “I’m sorry.”

His poor boy. To lose a second father, Bruce couldn’t even imagine. Dick had already borne too much loss in his young life. And to manage that grief while bearing the weight of the cowl, of the family…

But Dick was shaking his head, teeth gritted. “No, you don’t understand. I thought you were _dead_. We buried you. I-I, I tried to mourn you and… move on. We all did. I encouraged it. But we _left_ you.”

Yes. They had. But Bruce felt no hurt for that. They couldn’t have known.

“I’m back now,” was all Bruce said, words resting like a cupped palm atop Dick’s head.

“We were going to box up your stuff this weekend.” The confession was explosive, deafening like a sonic pulse in the silence of the dark room. “I didn’t tell anyone, but I’d already gotten the boxes. I only waited this long because of Alfred and because I…” A hushed sigh. “It was too final, even for me, but I didn’t want… I wanted to handle things differently.”

Differently than Bruce had. With his own parents. With Jason. With those frozen, silent shrines.

“What kind of partner does that?” Dick asked, taking Bruce’s silence as condemnation, or too lost in the roar of his own guilt to notice at all. “What kind of son?”

That, Bruce decided, was enough. He reached, wrapping an arm around Dick and pulling him close. Dick went without a fight but remained tense against Bruce’s chest. 

“One who made the best decisions he could based on available facts,” Bruce murmured. He didn’t expect Dick to make the same choices he had. Though they could work in silent synchronicity, coordinating and communicating with no words at all, they had disagreed just as much, often loudly. Dick was his own person, a fact Bruce had, with much stumbling, come to accept.

Bruce bent his neck to rest his cheek atop Dick’s scalp and added, “My way didn’t exactly make me the paragon of mental health.”

Dick snorted, then sighed, and Bruce sighed with him. They sat there, breathing together in the dark.

“This doesn’t feel real,” Dick confessed, breaking their silence abruptly. “Like, I’m awake, and I know you’re here, but…”

“But it feels like the kind of real from a dream, like sensations are pins and needles in your fingertips,” Bruce finished quietly. Dick sat up and pulled away from him in surprise.

“ _Yes._ ”

Bruce nodded once. “It was like that after… when Jason came back. Even once I was sure.”

“I keep expecting to wake up.” Bruce couldn’t see Dick now, the moon having ducked behind a cloud, but he could hear the restless rustling of a fidgeting leg against bed linens. “Like I’m going to turn a corner and you’ll be gone again.”

Bruce remembered Dick’s breathless sprint to the kitchen earlier, after he had returned to the study to find it empty.

“I made myself forget,” Dick admitted, and he leaned a bit until his shoulder pressed against Bruce’s, as if to comfort himself in Bruce’s presence even now. “On patrol, I made myself forget you were back, so I could focus on getting the job done. Because I kept thinking… what if I came back and you weren’t back at all.”

Bruce could see the logic in that. He had done it himself, for months, with Jason, with Clark. Except for when they were standing in front of him, he had to forget to stay focused, to stay sane. So Dick had gone out in Bruce’s gear, to fight for Bruce’s city, and then come home to find a dead man resting upstairs.

“Nightmare?” Bruce guessed, remembering the way Dick had hovered in the doorway.

“Didn’t get that far.” Dick slumped further, until he could smush his cheek against Bruce’s shoulder. “It was like… like if I didn’t get up, right now, and go look, you wouldn’t be here at all.”

It was the same fear Bruce had every time he closed his eyes.

Bruce hummed thoughtfully, then turned his head and pressed his lips to his son’s scalp. Dick’s hair was still damp from the shower, the ends of the curls soft with the smell of strawberries and a hint of cowl leather that no scrubbing could wash away. “Sounds like you better stay here for tonight, then.”

A huffed laugh then, weak but trying. “What will that solve?”

“I can’t go anywhere if you’re here.” They could keep each other grounded for the night.

Dick hesitated, considering. “You know there are things you don’t know,” he said at last.

It was a test, to see what Bruce would tolerate, where the limits to his love stood. Bruce remembered this from Dick’s early days, but knowing what it was didn’t keep his breath from catching in anticipation and dread.

“I know,” Bruce admitted for the first time to himself and aloud.

“You’re not going to like everything I did,” Dick warned. “A lot’s changed.”

There was that tremor again, that gut-twist at the whisper hissing from Pandora’s box. Tim. Cass. Jason. Dick and Damian’s strangely coordinated partnership. Bruce had hints, the spine of a beast cresting the surface of the water with the teeth still lurking beneath.

“I know,” Bruce repeated, more quietly than before. “But we’ll handle that tomorrow.”

His lower back protested as he sank down, supine against the memory foam mattress, taking Dick with him. “Go to sleep, chum. I’ll be here in the morning.”

Dick slept. And Bruce stared at the ceiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SEE? I promised that more was coming! And it's STILL coming, but, as always, my promise remains. Since I don't know WHAT is coming or WHEN or even HOW, each chapter will end with enough of a resolution so that it could be the last. No dangling open fics here, nossir. (That said, I have a rough idea of what the next installment might look like, and it will _not_ be Bruce POV finally.)
> 
> Also, a quick shoutout to audreycritter for soothing my insecurities with this chapter.
> 
> And lastly, if you want a peek at Dick while Bruce was presumed dead, try this: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15549537 It's sort of an AU to this AU, because in this one, I don't think Dick's let himself cry yet.


	5. Jason

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still truckin' along! Please mind the new tags on this one.

There was a plant on the windowsill, a springy little geranium. Jason almost didn’t notice, too intent on dodging traffic as he crossed the street. He looked up at the last moment, lips compressing as he caught sight of the pale pink petals.

So it was going to be one of those nights.

Jason locked his jaw as he hiked up the narrow, leaning staircase and ran scenarios in his head. Only a few people—one, really—knew the geranium warning, so at least he knew the _who_. It was the _why_ that was in flux, and it was never anything good.

The entryway was dark as he unlocked the front door and stepped inside, but there was a far-off glow from the other end of the hall. Jason shut the door behind him and lined up his boots next to the mat. The helmet he hung on the small shelf with his keys, his jacket, and his holsters. Normally, he would sweep the small apartment first, room by room, shadow by shadow, but his visitor was just as paranoid and just as thorough. The safe house was secure, and Jason could trust that.

Of course, that didn’t mean that there was no danger present.

Jason left the gun in his waistband and the knife on his ankle as he cleared the narrow entry hallway and ducked into the body of the apartment. The smell of food wrapped around his head like a scarf—Thai, if he judged the spices right. He clocked the bags on the counter first, each piled high with round black containers with plastic lids, then the opened book splayed on the sofa. The apartment was empty.

Bad.

Jason shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and did a slow turn as his hand crept to his back. The bathroom door was closed. With one hand resting on the butt of his gun, Jason crossed the tiny space and knocked on the bathroom door.

“You dead in there?”

Silence, and then, “Food’s on the counter. I brought Thai.”

“Doesn’t answer the question.”

“I’ll be out in a second.”

Still not an answer, but Jason wasn’t invested enough to push. He returned to the countertop and sorted through the food.

The geranium signal had been a good idea, he had to admit. Hood business always left him feeling untamed, like a squid stuffed into a suitcase. It was all lashing limbs and quick, violent strikes, but the core of him was trapped in a tiny little box. He wasn’t Jason out there. He was Hood. Only in the privacy of his safe house could he creep out of the box and unfurl. Unless there was unexpected company in his safe house, in which case he retracted back into the suitcase and started throwing haymakers.

It was a complicated metaphor. He only seemed to work on it when he was tired.

He was tired now, and all signs pointed to a long night.

Jason plucked a container of pad see ew from the bag along with a sheath of chopsticks and shuffled to his chair, flipping on the crappy plastic radio as he went. It would take a second for the volume to regulate, enough time for Jason to sink gratefully into the lumpy recliner and uncap the noodles. The radio settled into a recital of soft classical music—Chopin, he was pretty sure—that still fritzed and fuzzed with static every few seconds. He needed a new radio, a good radio, just like he needed a recliner that wasn’t the color of lint or a sofa that wasn’t more springs than cushion, but he hadn’t gotten there yet. He had the money, not a lot but enough, but buying nice things felt too much like putting down roots. Even the crap he had felt like too much of a concession.

The bathroom door opened. Jason kept his attention on his food, even as his focus followed the whisper-silent footsteps from the door across the small space and onto the kitchen tile. They were evenly paced and steady, a good sign though not definitive. He couldn’t smell blood or bile from where he sat, also good.

When Tim finally rounded the couch and plunked down on the end, Jason risked a look. The kid was in his black base layer, the sweat-wicking, anti-chaffing bodysuit that went under the Red Robin getup. Jason as Hood couldn’t risk a fully suited Red showing up at his place, but neither did he keep a spare change of clothes for the kid. The base layer, which looked like the kind of short-sleeved wetsuit a surfer or runner might wear, was close enough to a compromise that he allowed it. The real suit would be wadded up a corner of the bathroom until Tim was ready to leave.

The black material made it hard to gauge damage, but Jason couldn’t see anything major at first glance. No dislocated shoulders, no protruding fractures, no gaping wounds. This was, in some ways, a comfort, but in other ways more alarming than a flank full of buckshot might have been.

Tim—Jason, reluctantly, had begun to think of the kid by his name, at least some of the time–was not welcome in Jason’s safe house. Not this one, not any of them. That had never stopped him from popping up sporadically. The first time had been the worst—multiple gunshot wounds, beaten halfway to hell, and a dislocated finger. Since then, the kid would randomly appear, usually while bleeding, limping, or slumping into unconsciousness, and help himself to Jason’s medical supplies. He was good about refilling them; Jason had to give him that.

The bloody nights were the easier ones. Sometimes Red would appear without a scratch on him, sometimes with supply refills or food or some other gift, sometimes without. He would crawl in to talk, not _to_ Jason so much as _at_ him. No participation required. It was like he was so lonely for someone he could pretend was listening, it didn’t matter that that someone was Red Hood. Those nights gave Jason a headache.

The other nights, though, the dead quiet ones, those were the ones that felt like a clammy fingertip drawing a line down the ladder-steps of Jason's vertebrae. Tim would sit on the corner of the sofa or on the windowsill and not say a word. Those were the nights that confused Jason the most, but he had almost preferred them initially. He’d given up trying to run the kid off. No amount of threats or gun-waving seemed to scare Tim away, and now that Bruce was dead and Tim was on the outs with the new Batman, it didn’t matter much who had replaced whom.

It took Jason a while to piece together the common thread between all of Tim’s appearances. It wasn’t that the kid liked his company or thought of him as a refuge. It wasn’t even that Tim thought his threats were all bluster. No, nothing like that. Tim only came to Jason when he didn’t care if Jason shot him, or was dangerously close to hoping he did.

Jason didn’t mind tossing the kit a suture kit or an icepack from time to time, but he didn’t pry during the quiet nights. He didn’t want to give the impression he cared. Those kinds of questions, that’s what family was for, and that wasn’t what Jason was. And he’d given up calling Dickface. He’d only done it once or twice, left messages after nights that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, but it didn’t seem to matter. In a few weeks, the kid would tumble back through his window again, looking like he’d been hit by a truck, or he wouldn’t.

The question was what kind of no-injury night this would be. 

Tonight was quiet, but it didn’t feel loaded, Jason didn’t think. Tim had bypassed the food to pour himself a cup of water and was currently nursing each sip like it was the finest of bourbons. Jason kept slurping his noodles, gunning for the bottom of the dish. He wasn’t about to hang out. That was one of the unspoken rules, too. If the kid was here, Jason would stick around the apartment, but he was no babysitter. He needed a shower. He needed sleep. Couldn’t do either of those staring a hole through the living room floor. 

When the pad see ew was gone, down to the last fleck and drop, Jason pushed to his feet. He and Tim hadn’t exchanged a word between them, nor a glance beyond the first. At some point, the kid had slung his feet up and sprawled across the sofa to stare at the water-stained ceiling. Jason, from the kitchen, couldn’t see him when he spoke, except for a black tuft of hair off one end.

“Bruce is alive.”

The words were sudden and clear, spoken to the ceiling. Jason set his container in the sink and bit back a sigh as he reached for the dish soap.

“Sure, kid.”

He didn’t see any point in arguing. If Dick and Alfred couldn’t talk Red out of the delusion, what hope did Jason have? Not that he cared enough to wade in. And at this point, he’d heard the speech a dozen times, in a dozen different ways. Fiery, heartbroken, stubborn, passionate, spiteful, no matter the emotion fueling the outburst in the moment, Tim remained fully—delusionally—convinced that Daddy Dearest was alive. Somehow. Somewhere. Some _when_ , even, to hear him say it.

“No,” Tim was saying, voice curiously flat. “I mean he’s back. Booster picked him up.”

Jason nodded to himself as he ran the water. It wasn’t until a moment later that the words registered. The plastic container hit the bottom of the sink with a clatter.

“What.”

He must have missed something. Must have zoned out along the line and missed the sentence that would make this all make sense. The water was still running. Jason left it and took a step toward the couch.

“Try that again.”

A sigh, soft and weary. “I triangulated him, finally. Booster Gold picked him up. Bruce is alive and back in the Manor. Has been for a few days now.”

Jason had been jumped more than once in his life. It was a special kind of terror, to be set upon in the dark by unknown assailants. Getting hit was no fun. Getting hit in quick succession by blows you can’t even see coming were worse.

This felt a little like that.

Bruce was alive. Bruce was _home_. And he had been for days.

Jason didn’t know how to process any of that, so he started with the safest distraction. “You were _right_?”

“Yeah. Go figure.” The words held no whiptail sting. On the contrary, they rested flat and empty, dead on the floor.

Jason’s eyes narrowed. He walked around the couch, just enough that he could see Tim’s face. The kid was still staring at the ceiling, the way one might into an empty blue sky.

“You know, kinda figured you’d be a little happier about this.” _This_. Bruce. Alive. “You exhausted from rubbing Dickbutt’s face in it?”

“I…” Tim blinked once, slowly, like a slow wipe of the hand over his vision. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Do?”

Jason tried to remind himself that questions were bad. Questions were how they got you, like little hooks under the skin, like Lilliputian lines dragging you down. But if he stopped asking the kid questions, stopped digging into the small, containable mystery of why Tim was acting this way, then he would have to turn his attention to the larger issue at hand. He wasn’t ready for that yet.

One of Tim’s hands moved, just a little, an apathetic twitch of the fingers. “I did it. I was right. I brought him back.”

_So now what?_

The unspoken question hung in the air like smog.

“You…” Jason began, then faltered. Because he could see Tim’s future, or thought he did. Sure, maybe the kid had had a shit six months, but it was over. The door was open. The prodigal could be welcomed back into the fold. One of them, anyways.

“Go home, kid.”

“I don’t have a home.” What a line. It should have sounded ridiculous, like an emotional teenager deep in their emo phase. But Tim had said it calmly, like a truth that he had long ago made his peace with, and he was looking at Jason now, with eyes as clear and empty as the sky.

“Bull. You have the Manor,” Jason argued. “You think he won’t let you back?”

There was no way, no way Bruce would… would come back and not take Tim in. Not a chance. He tried to take _Jason_ back, once upon a time, just on his own terms. Didn’t work for Jason, and then he’d gone and blown it all to kingdom come, but this kid? Tim was… he was built to belong.

Jason smacked a hand against the cloth back of the couch. “Get up, kid. Go home. Go conk out on that stupidly good mattress.”

_Eat some of Alfred’s pancakes for me. Fall asleep in that one good spot in the sunroom. Lose an afternoon in the library. Don’t waste your life out here._

“It’s not my home,” Tim repeated with the weary patience of wisdom repeated to a stubborn toddler. “They pushed me out.”

“You left.”

Not that Jason had all the details or anything. He’d kept away from that mess. But he knew the Batman, the brother, Dickface was trying to be, and as much as Jason had some old wounds to lick, he knew Dick wouldn’t kick a kid out. All he did know was there had been some kind of blowup, Tim had turfed the Robin gig, and left without looking back. Stupid, but Jason kind of respected him for it, especially now that it turned out that he’d been right all along.

Tim sighed like Jason exhausted him, his gaze on the ceiling once more. “I left. Because Dick wouldn’t believe B was alive, and the brat was hell, and I couldn’t handle being treated like a nutcase _and_ dodging murder attempts every day. And then Dick took Robin and I just couldn’t—”

“What.”

“What?”

There was a ringing in Jason’s ears, faint and high like the whine of a mosquito. “What do you mean he took Robin.”

“He…” Tim faltered, eyes flicking to Jason warily. “He said Damian needed it more. He picked… He replaced me.”

A crease appeared between Tim’s brows, the first appearance of emotion beyond exhaustion. “I get it now. Why you were so… It hurts.”

Forget hooks beneath the skin. This was a harpoon.

Replaced. Tim hadn’t given Robin up. It was _taken_ , ripped from him like he was the dead one, not Bruce. Dick hadn’t even had the decency to put a cap in him first.

 _I’m going to kill him._ The thought rang clear as a crystal bell.

Jason hadn’t killed anyone in months. Six, to be exact. After the news, he had gone on a tear through Gotham, a bender with a wake full of bodies instead of bottles. He had torn through the city’s criminal class like a tiger’s paw through a house of cards. Even now, he didn’t look too closely at why. He just knew that when he’d come to, soaked in blood and smelling of smoke and gunpowder, the voice in his head hadn’t been his. It hadn’t been _only_ his for a long time, but that night his own voice hadn’t been there at all. He had drowned under the howl of the Pit, and coming up for breath had scared him sober.

Jason hadn’t killed anyone in months, but tonight that thought, that voice baying for blood, was all his.

“Robin is yours.” He sounded like he was vomiting glass, but the words were right. “Go take it.”

“I can’t—”

“You _can_.” Jason’s teeth were bared, his fists clenched, and he wanted to shake the boy on the couch. “That is _your_ suit, and _your_ home, and _your_ family. Yours. Go kick the little fucker out if that’s what it takes.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“Screw you.”

“I just…” Tim got the words out before Jason could storm off, but they seemed to be all he had prepared. He tried again. “Gotham needs Batman. That’s all I could think.”

He looked tired. Worse than tired, because he’d looked tired for six months, but now he looked like someone had gone and pulled his plug. There was nothing left in him.

“I’m not going to make him choose. Up there, he said…” Tim swallowed hard, scrawny throat bobbing visibly. “He said we were going home. But if I go back, he has to pick between me and the brat, which means he has to pick between me and Dick, and I just… I can’t. Gotham needs Batman, and the family needs Bruce Wayne. I did what I meant to do, and that has to be enough.”

“That’s stupid,” Jason rasped. “You know that, right? That’s… that’s stupid.”

“That’s what Robin does,” Tim retorted bleakly. “Robin saves Batman. No matter what.”

“Yeah, and sometimes Robin dies,” Jason spat.

“Yeah,” Tim whispered. “Sometimes he does.”

And that. _That_ was too close to the mark and too close to… something.

Jason stomped back into the kitchen where the water was still running. He shut it off and tried to think. So the kid had to stay the night. That wasn’t even a question. Jason was heartless, not stupid, and part of not being stupid meant not ignoring the prickling hairs on the back of his neck. He knew the signs, maybe not of what was planned but of what could be. Dick wasn’t an option anymore. The kid had to stay the night. The question was how to make him stay.

He spent longer than he should have on the dishes, scrubbing and rinsing and drying and sorting as he tried to think. His brain was clicking empty, with errant sparks of emotion as its only output. At least there’d been no movement on the couch. Jason hadn’t yet decided what he would do if Tim tried to disappear into the bathroom again.

The problem sorted itself. By the time Jason left the kitchen and rounded the couch, brain still clicking and humming with anxiety, Tim was sprawled on the couch, asleep. There was a way a body slept when it had been without for too long, like a man plunging his entire head beneath the water after a death march through the desert. If Jason had to bet, he’d say the kid hadn’t slept a wink since Bruce came back.

Bruce.

Jason wasn’t sure he believed it. Maybe the kid asleep on his couch had finally cracked, and that’s what this was all about. Bruce was dead. He’d died, blown to pieces, scorched into a flaking crust of a corpse. Jason knew this. He hadn’t gone to the funeral—that was family only—but he had snuck onto the grounds of the Manor and stood before the unmarked stone. That was what had sold him, the stone. If this were a trick, it would have been writ large, played out with flash and drama for whoever it was meant for—Gotham, the League, the world. Neither Bruce nor Batman did anything by half-measure.

But that stone. That unmarred rock, driven into the dirt next to the headstones for Thomas and Martha Wayne. That was private. That was meant for no eyes but those that _knew_. Jason had seen, and he had known.

He went back once more, a few weeks later, only to find Alfred sitting on the bench before the markers, silent tears streaming down the old man’s face. Jason never returned.

He had to know. If Bruce was back, then Batman—the real Batman—was back, and that was a thing worth knowing.

Jason cast another searching look at the boy on the sofa, but Tim was dead to the world. Enough, at least, that Jason could risk him being alive when he returned. His own rest for a moment abandoned, Jason pulled on a hoodie from the back of his closet, and then laced up his boots. He left a note on the door on the way out.

**Leave and I’ll kill you.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, you HAVE to read "Stubborn" by Audreycritter because the third chapter is the direct inspiration for this chapter. Like D I R E C T. To the point that it is branded on my psyche and I didn't even realize it until now, which is why I'm adding the link after the fact: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9425156
> 
> The "first time" Jason mentions is the third chapter of this fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17535599
> 
> Also, I keep mentioning the Waynes being "buried" on Manor grounds. They're not, ish. More on that here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18458111


	6. Jason, continued

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Manor never changed._
> 
> _So when Jason hauled himself across the property line, not only did it feel like stepping back in time, but he could do so with confidence._
> 
> _Nothing had changed, but Jason had changed._

The Manor never changed. Dig up an old sepia-tinged still from the Gotham Historical Society, place it next to one from last week, and there would be no difference except the topiary fad of the decade. Even modern conveniences and necessities, like driveway lights and security cameras and internet satellites, would be tastefully rendered invisible by careful planning.

So when Jason hauled himself across the property line, not only did it feel like stepping back in time, but he could do so with confidence. For all Bruce’s hyper-paranoid tendencies, he never changed the security configurations. Perhaps because it was only family who knew where each camera and trap was tucked. Family, and Jason. That should have been enough to merit a change.

Whatever the case, it made returning easy enough. Not that Jason returned often. In fact, since his return to Gotham, he had been back only twice—once to see Bruce’s grave for himself, and once before that to… Well, never mind about that.

But nothing was changed at all. Jason knew the smell of the woods, the little hassocks and ditches. He knew where to duck, where to fade, where to blend into the deepening shadows left by the setting moon. He knew the way a bird knew its way south where around him was the koi pond, the time capsule he had buried when he was thirteen, the perpetually scorched earth where residents from the decades before had set off firecrackers into the glittering night sky. He knew the curves of the walking paths and how far he would need to walk before the worn dirt would transition into neatly lined gravel. He knew how to walk that crunching path on silent feet until it brought him where he needed to go.

Nothing had changed, but Jason had changed. He had to watch his step in the woods, to make sure his large feet didn’t catch on a dip in the earth. He had to bend more, crouching and twisting to make sure the cameras didn’t catch the top of his head, the flank of his shoulder. He had to duck beneath the boughs of the tree that stood guard over the little cemetery, because while it had grown, he had grown more.

He had tried not to think on the drive over or the hike through the woods. It was harder than some might imagine. Jason knew they thought him stupid, an ignorant and brutish street thug. They thought his successes could be attributed to luck or a wiley, animalistic kind of wariness, like a rat that learns to evade a trap. And part of that was his fault, because when the Pit drove him… when the Pit drove him, he hadn’t been himself. Or he had been too much of the wrong part of himself. He tried not to think about that too much, either.

But thoughts, thoughts, Jason’s head was abuzz with thoughts. Like chittering insects, like chirping birds, they pecked at his consciousness. Questions he couldn’t yet answer, doubts he couldn’t stifle, fears he couldn’t ignore, voices from the past, memories indistinct with corrosion. They all silenced as he stepped off the gravel path and stood before the three stones.

Two were old and carved into the shape of crosses. They sat next to each other, ringed with perennial flowers, identical in height and form, save a chip on the arm of the one marked MARTHA WAYNE. They, like the rest of the Manor and its grounds, were exactly as they had been in Jason’s childhood. He hadn’t spent much time here as a child. The space had unnerved him, though it was a cemetery in name only. No bodies rested beneath the earth. But something about picturing Bruce Wayne, Batman, as a child who missed his parents had unsettled Jason. After his first curious visit, he had only ever returned when Bruce brought him or, once, when he had felt incandescent and impotent with teenage rage and had needed someone— _anyone_ —to talk to. They hadn’t answered back. He had died a week later.

The third stone, that was new. It was a _change_ that imposed upon Jason’s attention like a flashing neon sign. Not a cross, because a cross denoted a grave, and they couldn’t do that here, not here in this house that hadn’t publicly acknowledged another death. It was a literal stone, a rough hunk of rock pulled from the meandering creek bank in the woods. It bore no name, no dates, no indicator that it was anything other than a chunk of earth. A body lay beneath it.

Looking at it gave Jason a sinking feeling, like falling in a dream, like wreckage settling to the sea floor. The stone was a change, but it had not changed. It still stood where it had been planted, an immovable fact, surrounded by unblemished earth.

He had believed, just for a moment, that the kid had been telling truth. That Bruce was back. Alive. And he had felt—

Jason didn’t know what he had felt. He had refused to think about it, had shut everything back in the little suitcase in his mind and refused to think or feel at all. But now he was here. And the grave was here. And Bruce was dead. And he felt as empty as the grave was full.

He wished, briefly, as brief as a dim flash of light, that he’d allowed himself to feel one way or another before reality had narrowed him down to only one outcome. But then the wish was over as soon as it had begun. Jason had learned to kill his wishes quickly.

Jason stood in front of the three markers for a little while longer, unsure of what his next move should be. That’s what life was now, a series of next moves. He was fine with that most of the time, because they were his moves, his choices. He chose to kill or not to kill, to protect or to walk away. But now the idea of a next move held no appeal.

He found himself walking around the Manor, found as if coming to in a dream. He didn’t remember making the conscious decision to leave the grave. His feet and mind were separate. The former carried him down familiar paths, just within view of the cameras, just out of range of the most dangerous sensors. The latter mulled, gnawing on the issue of the boy on the couch like a dog at a flea.

It wasn’t his problem, Jason tried to remind himself. So the kid had officially, totally cracked. And he was on Jason’s couch. He’d come to Jason for help. That did _not_ mean he was Jason’s problem. The kid wasn’t family. He wasn’t even someone Jason liked. He wasn’t even Robin anymore. They had no ties to each other, especially not now that Bruce was… He could feel his brain stutter, like a skip in a tape.

He could see Bruce’s bedroom window from where he stood. It was dark, as it always was now. As it always would be. The drapes were pulled tightly, the Manor’s version of mourner’s black, and—

Jason’s brain stuttered again, less of a skip this time than the whine of a line disconnected. The drapes were open. And a shadow looked down at him.

There was no way to know. It was too far away. Too dark. Too vague.

But Jason _knew_.

He stood in moonlight, staring up at the window, jaw tightening until it ached. Then he turned and walked away.

* * *

There was a diner in town. If it had a name, Jason didn’t know it. It wasn’t on the outskirts or in the center. It wasn’t in the poorest neighborhood or the richest neighborhood. It sat on a nondescript block, surrounded by other nondescript storefronts, all a little rundown but with a shaggy sort of charm. The diner wasn’t the kitschy vintage kind, with 50s font and pastel striping. It was the legitimate kind, with bones from the 40s but overlapping remodeling from each successive decade, grinding to a plastic-and-formica halt in the 90s.

The food wasn’t very good. It wasn’t very bad either. It was what one might expect diner food to taste like at 3 AM—reheated, chockful of sugar and salt, and good enough. The main draw wasn’t the food or the decor or the location, but rather its proximity to a block of bars that all closed at 2 AM. Gotham’s bars were the metaphorical corners of the city, and its people were the dust bunnies. Sweep the corners, and they would blow elsewhere, like a 24-hour diner with dim lighting and squeaky plastic booths.

There was no camaraderie at being a regular of the diner. No one swapped names or introduced themselves. No one made eye contact, even the staff. The diner was a place to be, a place to be left alone, to hunker in a booth or on a stool and wait for the next dismal day to begin.

Jason didn’t eat here. He would order a cup of coffee, black and bitter, to warm his hands no matter the weather. He would sit hunched on a stool, elbows planted firmly against the tacky countertop, hands cupped around the chipped white mug, and wait. In time—twenty minutes, an hour, two—the stool next to him would fill with a presence.

He couldn’t remember exactly when it had first started, how the arrangement had come to be, what the first exchange had been. He just knew that the diner, in all its ambivalent neutrality, stripped him of being Red Hood, stripped him of being Jason Todd, for as long as he was inside, so that when the man sat beside him, both of them staring straight ahead rather than at each other, that’s all the man was. Just a man.

The man arrived twenty minutes after Jason sat down. He had been fast this time. His steps to the stool had been slow, the soft shush of shuffling feet almost lost beneath the warbled mumble over the overhead music. They sat shoulder to shoulder, mirrored in the way their elbows anchored against the counter’s edge. The man wordlessly ordered his own mug of coffee, and they waited while the waitress poured.

Jason couldn’t see him, and he refused to look. He kept his eyes fixed on the backstop, on the narrow counter where kitschy glasses stood in a jumbled row. He wondered how they came to be here, bearing logos from across the country. He stared at the Dollywood-branded glass in the shape of a cowboy boot and kept tabs on the dark blue hoodie in his periphery.

In the end, he broke first.

“So you’re back.”

“Yes.”

“Took you long enough.”

“Yes.”

_Thanks for the heads up. You’re a real peach for calling._ No. That wasn’t what this was about. But then, neither was the next thing that came out of his mouth.

“Doesn’t count, you know.”

Silence.

Jason’s eyes narrowed, seeing the cowboy boot, picturing the unmarked rock. “You claw your way out of your own grave, then it counts.”

A pause, and then a hoarse, “Yes.”

Jason was the one who brought it up, but now he found he wanted to back out of that avenue of conversation as quickly as possible. He could see sterile bandages peeking from the cuffs of the hoodie’s sleeves.

“You screwed a lot of things up, leaving,” he spat out. 

“I am… figuring that out,” came the slow reply.

_Some World’s Greatest Detective you are._ But he bit that back, too. Jason didn’t think he got nearly enough credit for all the things he never said. And that was what these diner meetings were. Long silences. Jason biting his tongue. Waiting.

He wasn’t stupid. He knew the silences were meant as a gift of sorts. They seemed like the only thing the man next to him knew how to give. Some days, they were the only gift he knew how to give back.

It was too easy to start a fight. And sometimes a fight was exactly what Jason wanted, but not here. That’s not what the diner was for. So instead of fighting or saying words that could lead to a fight, they sat in silence, suffocating under all the things they couldn’t say.

“Are you… How are…”

_No. Yes. I don’t know. What do you care? Do you care?_ Jason didn’t know what his answer would have been, but it didn’t matter. The question was against the rules. He cut it off before he could finish.

“Look, I know your hoarding habit has gotten out of hand, but when was the last time you did a headcount?” Jason sneered.

The body next to him tensed. The fingers on the counter, nicked with familiar, faded scars, curled, though they remained just loose enough not to be considered a fist.

The diner’s jukebox, a crackling, warbling piece of junk that played without quarters or commands, turned over to the next song. Jason knew it only faintly, an out-of-favor one-hit wonder that was only recognizable now from hold music and off-brand commercials. It added to the atmosphere of unreality, the one that whispered that maybe he wasn’t awake, maybe he wasn’t here, maybe the seat next to him was empty. He focused on the flat-tipped fingers.

“Here I thought you were a family man,” Jason pushed on, tone caustic despite his desire not to fight, because the bite of it gnawed on him, too. “Or is it just that you have too many brats to keep track of now?”

_You forgot me_ wasn’t a surprise. It was the dull smack of a thrown ball ricocheting off a wall. _I expected better of you_ was. Jason had thought he had stopped expecting anything of him.

“What,” the man next to him asked slowly, “do you know.”

_What have you done_ was what he meant.

A request for information, though it was phrased flat and wary. Jason considered lying, saying that he was responsible, that he _had_ done something. But his own mind pulled up the image of the boy sprawled on his couch, exhausted and empty. A boy who had turned to _Jason_ , out of everyone. A boy who had worn Jason’s colors.

“Have you even looked for him?”

“Outside.”

The order crackled like a live wire, and Jason’s spine stiffened.

“Wh—”

The seat next to him was already empty, the presence at his shoulder, crowding his space, and then beyond. As if the single word was enough to make Jason move, to risk leaving the neutral territory of the diner, to step out where there were no rules to protect either of them.

Jason followed. The diner let him pass unremarked.

Stepping out the door, Gotham air hit him like a gloved punch, muffled and sweaty. The air was thick with city stench, heavy with humidity. He felt suspended in it. Like he was still dreaming. He took in the narrow plot, the back alley lot nearly filled with only a handful of cars, shadows thrown long by the glitching safety lights. The city beyond was crowded out by the backs of the surrounding establishments, all trashcans and employee safety notices.

And then he turned.

And there was Bruce.

“Where is he?”

Jason’s knees locked, bracing as he stared. He hadn’t seen the body, but he had seen the grave. It was a dizzying swoop to discover that some dormant part of him hadn’t fully believed without the body and now was tumbling headlong in an attempt to reorder reality. Because this _was_ Bruce. Jason had known it in the diner, had recognized the feel of sitting shoulder to shoulder with the man he had grown up with, but now they were face to face. The labels were back on.

And this was why.

“Tim,” Bruce repeated, names now of use again. “Do you know where he is?”

“Don’t you?” Jason shot back. Bruce was reading him, like he always did, so Jason slumped against the peeling-paint back of the diner and shoved his hands into his pockets. A risky move. Hands were better visible, but he was worried what his might do.

He expected Bruce to push, to loom, to twist the silence that had been a gift into a battering ram. Instead, Bruce looked away, creased brow wrinkling further. “I’ve been calling. He won’t pick up. He took the battery out of his phone. Dick says his apartment is abandoned.”

That was news. Jason hoped, suddenly, that the note on the door did its job.

“What if I did?” Careful, careful, like easing around a street dog. No fear, no hesitation, but careful, careful.

“Did you—”

_Did you hurt him?_ Bruce clenched the question tightly before it could wriggle free, but Jason heard it nonetheless. This was why they had the diner.

He laughed, a bark of caustic spite exploding from his throat, hot as the bloo pounding in his ears. “Me? You really have no idea, do you.”

“Jay. Please.”

Jason could feel Bruce’s frustration—his desperation?—building like an electric charge in the air, but it was the name that did it. He hated how much he wanted to lean into it, like a dog into a gentle hand.

“He came to me.” Jason made no attempt to soften the blow, or the ones to follow. “ _Me_. For help. Because he couldn’t get it from anyone else. That’s how bad it is.”

He wanted to leave before any more questions were asked. He wanted to stay, because Bruce was alive and standing next to him without gunfire. Jason risked another look. Bruce was looking away, across the parking lot, jaw tense. It was, Jason realized, the closest they had been without rooftops or masks between them. So were the changes he saw from Bruce’s “death” or from before even then?

Start with what was easiest and catalogue quickly. Bruce was chewing through what he had said, but he would be back soon with more questions and a gaze Jason couldn’t meet. Quick was the only way. The slight hunch to the shoulders was new. Alfred wouldn’t allow that. The hunch combined with a subtle twist to the torso likely meant an injury. How bad? Bruce tended to hide all but the worst, but if it had _been_ the worst, he wouldn’t have been wandering around the Manor in the butt-crack of the night. Too tired to hide it, then, or giving up a weakness deliberately. For Jason? But he didn’t trust Jason. That was easy enough to read in his stance, in the slant of his feet and the readiness of his bent knees. 

Too much to parse. Move on.

The extra silver at the temples, that was new. Not that Jason had much chance to study Bruce Wayne’s hairline, but he’d seen photos online, the standard pap shots, and Bruce’s hair had been as black as ever. And maybe his memories of the before were still messed up, as jumbled and faded as a box of photographs bleached by the sun, but he didn’t remember Bruce having that many weary lines on his face. Even so, he knew that face.

Bruce’s attention was swinging back, so it was Jason’s turn to look away. He wondered when Bruce looked at him, what changes _he_ saw. Then he kicked that thought in the face.

“If I went to him, would he run?”

Jason blinked and almost, almost looked at Bruce. What was the world they were living in that Bruce would ask _him_ that? He nearly answered—something sharp and sarcastic and likely not true—but then snapped his teeth shut and reconsidered. There were troubles even he didn’t joke about. At least not about anyone other than himself.

“Yeah.”

There was a long silence as Bruce considered this. “Do you know why?”

“Yeah.”

The silence was back again, this time the pressing, obdurate kind Jason was accustomed to. He pushed off the wall, nerves jangling.

“This isn’t my fight. I’m not getting involved. If you try to _get_ me involved, I swear I’ll make you regret it. You want details, talk to your golden boy. This is his mess.”

Jason had no guilt in sharpening the end of that accusation. He didn’t care if Dick’s choice had been right or wrong or some mix of the two. He knew betrayal when he saw it. Dick should’ve known better.

He could feel more than see Bruce nod. The question that followed still caught him like a blow to the back of the head. “Will he be safe with you until I get to the bottom of this.”

Another flat-ended sentence, a question phrased as a statement. A hand, open-palmed and extended. Jason went utterly still.

_NO_ burned on his lips, because NO he did not want to be involved and NO he hated the Replacement and NO NO NO. He wanted to go to bed or maybe leave town for the next ten years. But Bruce was asking. More, Bruce was saying like it was something he would believe, if Jason said yes.

“For now.” That was the best he could do. It would be up to him whether that meant a day or a week or an hour.

“I need to get back.” It wasn’t a thank you, which wouldn’t have been accepted anyways. But it was an offering of sorts. “I shouldn’t be out of bed.”

Jason’s eyes cut to Bruce quickly then at the blatant admission of weakness. He considered the sweat on the man’s brow, the pallor of his skin, his mention that Dick had been the one to go to the kid’s apartment. He filed it away for another day, one that didn’t have him swaying on his own feet with weariness.

“Work fast,” Jason warned. “I’m no babysitter.”

He turned abruptly and began to walk away, hands still jammed into his pockets. His bed was singing a siren song from across town.

“Jay.” The name pulled him to a stop. Jason twisted on heel to look over his shoulder.

Bruce watched him. (Bruce. Living. Breathing.) “You changed your number.”

Jason’s brow furrowed, not understanding.

“Dick checked your safe houses, too. The ones he knew about, anyways.” Bruce swallowed, visibly, eyes steady on Jason’s face. “It was good to see you.”

This was why they had the diner, too.

Jason was already retreating, leaving as quickly as he could without it seeming like a retreat. He threw up a vulgar gesture over his shoulder and didn’t look back.

He waited until he was almost back at the safe house to duck into an alley and weep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohhhhh how this chapter fought me. But I prevailed!
> 
> Two related fics for you. The third chapter of this fic is where Jason first helped Tim: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17535599 And here's where I previously established the Manor's body-less cemetery: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18458111


	7. Damian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Damian preferred an elevated altitude. It wasn’t that he derived joy from heights like Grayson. He was fairly certain no one did. Grayson’s love came from the circus upbringing, the comfort on high wires that Grayson sometimes spoke of on quiet nights. Whereas Damian’s interest came more from tactical considerations._

Damian preferred an elevated altitude. It wasn’t that he derived joy from heights like Grayson. He was fairly certain no one did. Grayson’s love came from the circus upbringing, the comfort on high wires that Grayson sometimes spoke of on quiet nights. Whereas Damian’s interest came more from tactical considerations.

First, to his eternal consternation, Damian was shorter than many he encountered. Artificial elevation from a crate, a ledge, a ladder, a roof, or other landing ensured him the high ground and therefore the advantage. Grayson assured him that he was tall for his age, but that was a phrase Damian loathed. _For his age._ Grayson might be content to remain substandard, but Damian wished to be tall, period.

Second, thorough training from the League had impressed upon him the advantage of a dramatic entrance. Heights were very dramatic, as they provided ample opportunity to loom intimidatingly from above.

And third, as the masks of Gotham well knew, few people thought to look up. Ordinary people were two-dimensional at best, stuck on a flat plane that encouraged them to look about but never above. Staying as high as possible provided the element of surprise and the advantage of stealth. Even vigilantes weren’t entirely immune.

Case in point: Right now, when Damian, from his crouched position in the upper recesses of the Cave, could hear the fight happening below.

At first, he hadn’t realized it was a fight. He hadn’t paid attention at all, since his attention was not on the Cave floor, but on the hard to reach places far out of sight where the bats kept their young. Damian was careful to give the pups plenty of room so as not to alarm the parents, but he had discovered that if he held completely still for long enough, eventually the colony would settle and ignore his presence. He liked the challenge of the stillness and the solitude of the space, so he disappeared back there as often as he could without arousing suspicion. While Damian knew the bats’ home was known, he didn’t want to risk drawing attention to them should Grayson or Pennyworth deem them pests.

The fight had started as a discussion at first. Or maybe it had always been a fight. Damian wasn’t sure. Nothing here in Gotham was familiar, even the way hierarchical struggles were handled. Back home, orders were given and obeyed. Bids for power were respected if successful and crushed mercilessly if not. He had never heard anyone dare argue with Grandfather. Challenges were made physically, a test of blood and steel, or else waged in total privacy, with poison and shadows.

So when the… talking began below, Damian paid little notice, beyond to make sure that he remained still and silent, his attention still on the bats above. He didn’t mean to eavesdrop—not that he would have been ashamed if he had started listening on purpose. Intelligence gathered was like a good stick. It would come of use in one way or another.

Intelligence was good to have in this strange city, especially now that Father was back. Damian had assumed that his strongest connection would be with his father. They were blood, after all, and Mother had trained him to be the perfect heir. He had expected perhaps not a connection but at least a mutual understanding. Rules he could comprehend and follow. A familiarity. Instead, Father had been as bewildering as the rest. And then he had died, only to return again, just as incomprehensible as before.

Father was the one talking now, below with Grayson in a Cave they both thought was empty. Damian kept half an ear on them while he watched a mother bat groom the pup tucked beneath her wing, but then his attention was arrested by the sound of his name.

The Cave’s acoustics were varied. Because of the natural outcroppings and uneven surfaces, sound bounced oddly in the back portion of the space. Though sound carried cleanly in the industrialized heart, Damian’s perception was limited by where the speakers happened to be standing, their movements, and the science of acoustics amplifying or dropping sounds suddenly. So while Damian couldn’t hear everything, he heard enough.

Father was angry about Drake, that the ex-Robin had been weak and ceded his place to Damian. Damian hadn’t realized Father was angry initially. His voice had been so quiet, so flat. Grandfather hissed when he was angry. Father spoke like nothing was different. At least to begin with. He was yelling now. Or… not yelling, but thundering. His voice was low, not raised, but it cracked like a whip in the echoes of the Cave.

“This is his _home_. You had no right to drive him from it.”

A reply, inauible, from Grayson, and then, “ _Tim_ is my Robin.”

It hurt to hear. Damian was surprised by how much. He knew Father wasn’t fond of him. That had been clear from the start. And feelings didn’t factor into judgements. Either he was good enough to be Robin or he wasn’t. He just… he had thought he was. Grayson had made him Robin, as was his right as the son of Batman. Grayson had _kept_ him as Robin, had treated him like a partner, an equal. There were no equals in the League, only superiors and subordinates. While Father had yet to see him perform in the field, surely Grayson’s testimony should carry some weight.

Grayson. Grayson was yelling now, actually yelling. He didn’t have Father’s control, his voice a bright lightning strike to Father’s thunderclap. He was angry at Father, and Damian wanted to be pleased, because Grayson was angry on Damian’s behalf, but every new shout brought a sickening twist of fear to his stomach.

The bats rustled overhead, unsettled by the noise, and Damian’s fingernails bit into his palms to keep his hands at his sides instead of over his ears. What if Father punished Grayson for his insolence? Damian had never heard anyone dare challenge Grandfather, much less raise their voice to him. Perhaps Father meant his no killing rule, but there were many forms of discipline that could stop just short of death. And if Father hurt Grayson, what was Damian’s part? Grayson was _his_ Batman.

No, he couldn’t abide by this. If they were going to duel over his fate as Robin, he would have a say. Damian braced his hands against the wall and was just about to rise to his feet and move to the heart of the Cave when Grayson let out a shriek of frustration, his voice echoing clear as a bell into Damian’s hiding spot.

“You have _no_ idea what these last six months have been like! How much _work_ I’ve put into him! You don’t care, and you’re going to ruin everything.”

Damian froze, every muscle in his body tensing like he had been struck by Grayson’s lightning voice. He stayed, listening, as Grayson made it very clear how difficult the last six months had been for him. How much of a burden Damian had been.

_Work._

The fight went on for some time more. They fought over Damian, over the mantle of Robin, over Drake, over the role of Batman, round and round. Mostly over Damian, though, at the heart of things. Father did end up yelling more than once. Grayson never really stopped. Damian just wanted them to stop, though he no longer cared who stopped it or how. After all, he had no call to defend Batman, either one, if neither of them claimed him. If it put an end to the condemnations, the truths he hadn’t known.

Damian wondered distantly, as he sat and listened to the shouts below, if he would be sent back. He was fairly certain his mother would let him return, if only to keep him out of enemy hands. But she would be disappointed in him. Grandfather would be more than disappointed—at Damian for failing and at Mother for sending him away in the first place. And whatever Grandfather felt would cascade down upon them both.

Eventually, the cacophony subsided and the Cave emptied. Damian was left alone, just him and the bats. The colony squeaked above him, chattering softly to each other in their little families, a soft, warm huddle of bodies cuddling and squabbling and nursing and grooming. 

Damian dragged his forearm across both cheeks to wipe them clean, then at last rose to his feet. His knees and calves hurt from the tension, like a night of patrol without stretching. He was not seen exiting his hiding place, nor exiting the Cave at all. The Manor was vast, too accommodating in its layout to avoid others, like the labyrinths beneath the League’s various outposts. That was good. He didn’t wish to encounter anyone in this wretched, miserable place.

He had almost made it to the staircase when Father appeared, crossing the hall from one room to another.

Father always looked vaguely startled to see him, as if Damian were a particularly striking beetle that had crossed his path or a forgotten houseguest who had stayed past welcome. Damian had thought it was because his mother had hidden his existence until recently and had hoped that Father would quickly adapt to his presence. Then Father had died and it hadn’t mattered. Now he wondered if Father expected to see Drake instead. It made Damian want to break something, but that was forbidden behavior, so instead he stalked past Father quickly so as not to see the dumb deer look on his face.

“Damian.”

It was just his name, not a command, but Damian stopped on habit and turned. But while obedience might control his feet, it did not control his face.

“What?” he asked, just short of punishable rudeness. Punishable here, anyways. He would have been slapped in his true home.

Father hesitated, not angrily, but uncertainly. Damian didn’t like that. Anger he could handle. Disappointment. Rage. Disdain. But treating him like a volatile unknown was untenable. It made him angry, and anger made him stupid. Damian clucked his tongue and turned away without waiting for dismissal. The skin between his shoulder blades prickled all the way to his room, but Father did not retaliate.

Damian shut his bedroom door and leaned against the cool wood. He eyed the quarters dispassionately. He spent little time in his room ordinarily, preferring to return to it only to sleep. It wasn’t a space he enjoyed, but it had its uses. A closed door was respected here, at least for the most part. He would be left alone here. No disapproval, no expectations, no disappointment. But he would only be able to retreat for so long.

At least Father would not patrol tonight. Pennyworth forbade him for at least a few days more. Though that meant Damian would take to the streets with Grayson. He had been worried about the state of their partnership with the return of the true Batman. Had anticipated their nights together with a mix of eagerness and trepidation, aware that they may not have any left. But now it was all spoiled.

_Difficult._ A trial. A burden that had weighed down Grayson as much as his grief. The angry confessions still echoed in Damian’s ears.

Damian considered saying he was ill and calling off patrol that evening, but reluctantly discarded the idea. He was no coward, and he would not relinquish his claim so easily.

He was a Wayne. He was an al Ghul. He was Robin. Whether anyone wanted him to be or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I literally dragged this chapter out of me 200 words at a time. Whuff. And y'all, this was suppose to have so much more, but my brain said No, so either I'll get things patched between B and his boy at a later date or this fic is gonna break real bad. (That said, this fic is meant to FIX things so I'll try not to leave things broken for too long. For anyone.)
> 
> But also, I've felt bad for people who keep thinking this fic is Done-done, so I've cobbled together a rough idea of how much is left and committed to continuing until it's finished (as opposed to writing each chapter as a potential end), so we'll see how that goes. Will still do my best to avoid cliffhangers, though.


	8. Tim, continued

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Tim lay facedown, nose smashed into the short, scrubby carpet, and tried to remain still._

It was a common trope in stories, the camera panning to watch through the protagonist’s eyes as a supporting character—a friend, an ex-lover, some plunky tertiary person whose name the audience had only just learned ten minutes ago but already loved—painstakingly crosses a precarious path. They shuffle across cracking ice or a crumbling ledge or a swinging rope bridge, and the audience cares because the protagonist cares, shouting encouragement and direction as the supporting character slowly closes the gap between danger and safety. They look up and lock gazes with the hero. Perhaps they smile. And then the world disintegrates beneath their feet.

The last six months had felt a lot like that for Tim. He wasn’t deluded enough to think himself the protagonist in any story of note, and most of the time, he was at peace with his secondary status. He was happy to follow, to support. Life, in a banal, first-world way, had been a crumbling rope bridge slung across a deep abyss, and he thought he had found the path to security. Sure, life as a Gotham vigilante was dangerous and uncertain, but he wasn’t walking the path alone. He was following Bruce, following Dick, following Cass even, and that was more than he could have said before.

And then Bruce died. The ice melted. The ledge disintegrated. The plank snapped. And Tim had been in freefall ever since.

In movies, the sacrifice of the two-bit actor always served a greater purpose for the hero. That’s what sacrifices were for. It was hard to live a life in freefall, so Tim hadn’t tried. He’d just wanted his sacrifice to mean something. It didn’t matter what happened to him when he hit the ground, so long as it meant something for Bruce.

Maybe it had been selfish to hope that he would feel something again before he reached that end.

Losing Bruce hadn’t felt real. Loss should, especially a loss like that. Tim had wept for his own father, a man who couldn’t reliably remember Tim’s birthday, but Bruce’s death had just made him feel numb and sparkling, like a jar emptied clean on the beach by a rushing wave. 

Tim had been so confused, bowled over by the lack of reality, until he had recognized the sign for what it was. Bruce’s death should have been the end of the world. It wasn’t. So Bruce couldn’t be dead.

Bruce’s “death” had been the sudden plunge and everything that followed the freefall. Life was little more than a smeared blur in his periphery. He didn’t— _wouldn’t_ — feel any of it. Not the betrayal of his family. Not the loss of his home. Not the disbelief of his friends.

It wasn’t real and it didn’t matter.

After months of searching, when Tim had finally found the proof he needed that Bruce was alive, he hadn’t brought it to what was left of the Golden Trio. He knew there was no point. He had gone to them before, desperate and certain, and they had ignored him. Superman had thought him weak, broken by grief. Wonder Woman, so passionate about truth, had seen him stuck on his own conviction. They had passed their verdict, and the rest of the League fell in line.

No, when Tim had found his proof, he had called for the Martian Manhunter and _forced_ J’onn to see, to listen. And it had worked. J’onn had been his lever to move the whole of the JLA, and through them, he had brought Bruce back.

So why was he still falling?

No, really. Why was he still falling?

Tim lay facedown, nose smashed into the short, scrubby carpet, and tried to remain still. He _was_ still, he was pretty sure, only he felt like he was spinning and falling and hurtling into an endless abyss. He didn’t know where he was. He could feel the hot skin on his arms above his elbows and up his spine. The carpet smelled like dust and damp and rubbed roughly against his fingertips as he dug his hands into it, trying to slow his descent.

This was bad. It was bad, and he couldn’t remember why. The prickling forearms were bad and the spinning in his head was bad and the way he didn’t really care that it was bad… was bad. There was something about that, wasn’t there? Something he was supposed to remember… or a promise… or something…

Tim reached blindly with one hand, the other still clutching at the carpet, and felt about until his hand closed over the phone. He could enter in the number blindly, not by habit, because he had never called it before, but by memorization. It was protocol, an old training drill he hadn’t shaken, to know his contacts by heart and to be able to dial by touch.

The phone was ringing. He meant to wait until someone was on the other end and then slur out something like _Help_ or _Make it stop_ , but the world went black at the edges and then staticky in the middle. The next thing Tim knew, there was a hand gripping his shoulder, shaking him.

_No,_ he wanted to say, _stop. You’ll knock me loose._ But he felt less like he was falling and more like he was being crushed against the floor. The hand moved up to his forehead and then jerked away as a far-off voice hissed.

There was talking. He couldn’t make out the words.

He was gone again.

* * *

Returning felt like churning upward through boiling molasses—slow, heavy, suffocating, oppressive. Tim was aware of the weight of it before anything else, the way his limbs felt pinned to the bed and raising up was an unthinkable impossibility. Next was the heat, the way he was cooking from the inside out. Then the steady beeping next to his ear. A heart monitor. Which meant a hospital.

Oops.

Tim couldn’t remember what he’d done. He hadn’t been out on patrol in ages, a promise to… well, to people who shouldn’t be asking for promises like that but did anyways. So he wasn’t injured, he didn’t think. Had he been hit by a car? He didn’t feel broken enough for that. Just the usual brokenness.

Nothing for it but to open his eyes and find out, he supposed.

Tim scraped his eyelids open just enough to peer through the slits and let his gaze rove. The room was smaller than he expected. More like an observation room than a proper hospital room. Maybe he was in the ER? There were posters on the wall, but his vision was fuzzy and he couldn’t make out the details. He thought he could see a small counter with a sink and some overhead cabinets. More posters. He turned his head in the other direction, looking for his call bell, and startled to find himself looking straight at Bruce.

Well, this was awkward.

Bruce must have heard him wake, or had been watching him this whole time, because as soon as Tim turned his head, Bruce leaned forward intently.

“Tim.” The name was rich and sweet and warm with concern. No one said Tim’s name the way Bruce did. “Can you hear me?”

Tim grunted. It was a pretty fair imitation of one of Bruce’s own grunts, but it didn’t win a smile.

“You’re at the clinic,” Bruce said, answering the question Tim hadn’t asked yet. “We weren’t sure what was wrong, so this seemed… more prudent.”

In case it was mask-related, he meant. Who was _we_ , though? Tim slowly pondered his way through opening his mouth to ask, but before he could relay the information from baking brain to dry-caked mouth, Bruce’s hand was in his hair, brushing the sweat-soaked strands off his forehead. Tim couldn’t decide if he wanted to purr like a cat or weep. Overwhelmed by either option, he sighed and let his eyes slide shut again.

“You have a fever,” Bruce was saying, and that was a balm, too. Because Bruce was here, talking to Tim. “Leslie managed to get it down some, but it’s still higher than I would like.”

Oh, a fever. Right. That’s what this brittle, achey, burning feeling was. That made sense. Tim was glad Bruce was here to piece things together for him. What a relief that was, to let someone else figure things out. It felt like a treat, like a snow day or breakfast in bed. Like Bruce’s hand in his hair.

Bruce was still talking, so Tim tried to pay attention. It was hard to listen, though, with the ringing in his ears. And he kept noticing different parts of him that were hot—a flare from his left shoulder, a hot-numb prickle from his toes. It was unpleasant and distracting.

Whatever Bruce was saying, he was done saying it, because Leslie Thompkins was here. Tim hadn’t seen the doctor in a while. Though she had a reputation in the boroughs for not being a narc, she tattled to Alfred, so Tim had avoided her along with everyone else over the last six months. She looked just the same—tired, stressed, jaded, irritated, but secretly pleased to see them. Maybe. That’s what Dick always said, anyways. Tim had taken his word for it.

Oh, now Dr. Thompkins was talking. Bruce was still running his hand through Tim’s hair, but Tim blinked his eyes open wider and tried to pay attention.

“—not very large or unclean, so there shouldn’t be this kind of reaction. I’m running tests to see if there’s some kind of toxin involved. Who were you fighting? Tim?”

Tim blinked again. His head felt very heavy. “Hmm?”

Dr. Thompkins sighed, exasperated. She did that a lot when they came to visit. “The cut on your leg is infected,” she said slowly, enunciating each word clearly like toothpicks punched through the clouded cellophane of his fever. She touched a finger to a spot on the outside of his left leg, just above his ankle. Tim flinched. “Who gave this to you? Did you get a good look at the blade?”

Tim’s forehead wrinkled as he tried to think back. He didn’t remember being in a fight, not recently. Not since before Bruce came back. After, he’d been too low. Red Robin felt like even more of a joke with Batman back, the real Batman. He hadn’t gone out, not in a mask. Then he’d ended up at Jason’s and stayed there for a little while, and then he’d gone back to his depressing little apartment and—

Oh. Well now he just felt stupid.

“Just glass,” Tim mumbled.

“From a window?” Bruce asked.

Tim shook his head, careful not to dislodge the hand or upset his sweltering brain. Man, he felt _bad_. “Dropped a cup.”

That was all. He’d tried to get himself some water, had fumbled like an idiot and dropped the cup, and then a shard had caught him across the leg. Simple. Banal. Stupid. He’d stared a little too long at the broken glass, scared himself, and had gone to bed without cleaning up the cup or his leg. Tim couldn’t remember now if he had ever gone back for the glass. He supposed he must have. He hadn’t tended to the gash on his calf.

Dr. Thompkins was frowning. Bruce was, too, even though Tim wasn’t looking at him. Tim could just do that, sense disapproval rolling in like fog.

“Tim, a cut from a clean glass shouldn’t look like this,” Bruce said slowly. That was his disbelieving voice, the one he used when he thought you were hiding something but didn’t want to say so outright. It wasn’t a tone that used to bother Tim, but did now. After six months of not being believed, how could it not?

“Well, it does,” Tim bit out. He pulled his head away from Bruce’s hand, which had stopped moving anyways, and tried to look down at his own leg. The effort made him feel cross-eyed, and he slumped back against his pillow.

“Do you know why?” Dr. Thompkins asked. Tim bet if he could see her clearly, her eyes would be gleaming behind her glasses. She was worse than Bruce when it came to interrogations.

“Maybe I stopped taking my antibiotics,” Tim mumbled. The doctor made a displeased clucking noise, and Tim covered his eyes with his hand. The lights were too bright. He wanted to sleep. “I just forgot, okay?”

“What—” they both began before Bruce ceded to Dr. Thompkins to finish. “What were you taking antibiotics for?”

This was no longer fun. Not that raging fevers were usually fun, but Bruce was _here_ and for half a minute Tim had thought that meant that at last someone else could take responsibility. But he’d forgotten why he’d stop letting other people make decisions for him.

“Can we save the third degree for when I’m not dying?” Tim mumbled. The room, already hazy with heat, was starting to fade, and he was going with it. 

“You’re not dying,” Bruce snapped, and Tim winced. He hadn’t meant it like that.

“Tell me what the antibiotics were for and we’ll let you sleep,” Dr. Thompkins bartered.

However, she and Bruce failed to consider that Tim held the ultimate counteroffer, in that he was very sick and very tired. With his eyes already closed and Bruce’s hand no longer in his hair, it was easy enough to let the weight of fevered exhaustion drag him under again. He thought he could hear the wind in his ears as he fell.


	9. Bruce, a fourth time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Bruce called Jason from the hallway outside Tim’s room._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more profanity in this chapter, again courtesy of Jason.

Bruce called Jason from the hallway outside Tim’s room. The phone rang six times. Bruce hadn’t considered what he would do if Jason didn’t answer. Jason _shouldn’t_ have answered. Late-night diner meetings aside, they weren’t close. They weren’t even family, to hear Jason tell it. But Jason had been the one to call first, raising Bruce from an unknown number to bark out that he’d found Tim passed out on the floor, gasping with fever, and was taking him to Leslie. And he had stayed at the clinic with Tim, disappearing only once Bruce roared up to the back door. He had been the one Tim had gone to. He had been the one Tim had called. So Bruce had to know.

“Did you know?” Bruce demanded. He sounded angry. He knew this, could hear it in his own voice when such awareness usually eluded him, knew anger with Jason—with this Jason—was like a match pressed to a Molotov. But there were other priorities at play.

Jason tried to respond with something harsh and profane, but Bruce pressed on. “Did you know his spleen was missing?”

“Who?”

“Tim.”

“What? Fuck. No.” A beat. “ _I_ didn’t—”

“I know.” And he did. Strangely, it hadn’t crossed his mind to suspect Jason. Or it had, but Bruce had discarded the idea just as quickly. Jason had been furious when he had called Bruce, a bright, fiery anger fueled by mounting fear. 

“How do you—”

“Leslie ran a scan.”

Leslie hadn’t known either. She had been the one to notice the scar, vicious, gnarled, and still healing, and had run the diagnostics to see what lay beneath. They had both stared at the monitor in disbelief, Bruce with tingling numbness dancing down his limbs. Then he had stormed into the hall, leaving Leslie to monitor Tim.

“Leslie thinks it was a bladed weapon of some kind, maybe three months ago. There was internal damage. As best she can tell, it’s healing, but he’s missing a spleen.”

That was all he knew. Someone had _stabbed_ his son. And Bruce had been off in another time, another place. Bruce paced, his own injuries protesting with each step. “Think, Jason. Three months ago. What happened? Who was in play?”

“I hardly keep the kid’s day planner for him,” Jason snarled.

“Jay.” _Please._ It was as close as Bruce had ever come to begging, at least to another person.

“I don’t know, okay? Three months ago, I don’t remember the kid being underfoot as much, but that doesn’t mean anything. Stop hounding me and go talk to Goldie.”

Dick. Maybe Dick would know. But what would it mean if he did and hadn’t told Bruce?

There was a sound on the other end of the line like a far-off explosion.

“Fun’s starting, gotta go,” Jason said with a growl that was too much Hood. “I’m tossing this phone, so don’t call me again.”

“Ja—” But the line was already dead.

The second call was short and just as fraught. Dick answered on the first ring. Bruce had dropped everything at Jason’s call, leaving without warning to Alfred or Dick. The discovery back at the Manor had been unpleasant. Atop all that, the ground between Bruce and his eldest was still fragile after their last fight, the air still choked with everything said and unsaid. 

In the end, there was little to learn in this call either. Dick had been just as baffled. He was upset he didn’t know. Bruce was upset he didn’t know. Bruce stayed in the clinic hallway afterward, slumped against the wall with his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose for several long moments. The hallway offered no answers either.

Bruce took Tim home. He didn’t know what else to do. Until Tim woke, there would be no answers, and Bruce wouldn’t surrender him to a hospital. At home, he would be safe, cared for. Bruce would see to that.

They drove home with Tim laid out on the back seat and one of Bruce’s arms twisted around to hold his hand. Tim remained limp as death, and only the heat of the fever kept the memories at bay. At the Manor, equipment from the Cave was relocated to Tim’s room, monitoring his vitals with brutal accuracy. The steady beeping was an annoyance and a comfort. The medical detritus felt like a mockery of Tim’s usual clutter.

Tim’s consciousness ebbed and flowed. After the third day, he was out of danger, the fever low and simmering as it burnt off the remains of the infection, but he stayed awake for no more than a few minutes at a time, and he was never fully present. Sheer exhaustion was what was keeping him under now, if Bruce had to guess. 

He could see the signs, now that he knew what to look for. That’s what made Bruce angry, that everything had been right in front of his face, and he hadn’t seen. His own injuries and illness weren’t an excuse. He knew they weren’t. Because he had _chosen_ not to see, not to notice.

For the fifth time in the last hour, Bruce crossed the darkened room and pressed a palm to Tim’s forehead. It was the fourth day now, and the fever seemed ready to break for good. He let his hand linger, fingertips in sweat-soaked hair, then replaced the lukewarm washcloth with a fresh, chilled cloth.

The dim nightlight in the corner pooled shadows beneath Tim’s closed eyes, collecting in the sunken, bruised skin. He had always been a thin child, gangly with youth and sharp-boned, like one good break would shatter him. Bruce had worried about that, even in the early days when he had been too low to worry about anything else, how the boy next door always looked one glancing blow away from cracking. Now, six months later, Tim didn’t have the substance of glass anymore. He was paper, thin tissue-paper wings a breath away from crumpling.

Bruce should’ve known the moment he saw Tim that something was wrong. The dark, insomnia-driven bruises under his eyes, the hair that was too long for someone living under Alfred’s care, the broken nose, the injuries fading but still too fresh. He was Tim’s _father_. His Batman. He should have known.

Recrimination chased him from the room, chittering and mocking like hyenas at his heels.

_He came to me for help. Me. That’s how bad it is._

That’s what Jason had said. Bad. Tim turning to Jason was bad, and not even Bruce’s pragmatic hope in his family could deny it. That small morsel of truth had been enough to force Bruce to dig for more, and what he’d found…

Man was not made to be alone, it was said. Bruce hadn’t found that true for himself, but it was true for Tim. Tim, of all people, deserved not to be alone. Bruce had sworn to himself, vowed on everything he held dear, that Tim’s life at the Manor would not be like his childhood with the Drakes. He had _sworn_ it.

Downstairs, Bruce leaned against the edge of the sink, suddenly weary to his bones. He felt like he was back in the Watchtower, dazed and boneless as the world spun around him. He was too much of a realist to think life had ever been simple. Even before his death, life as Batman, life as a father, meant turmoil and heartbreak and exhaustion. But there had been peace, too. Love. Happiness. Sweet moments of serenity. And even the complications had seemed conquerable, like their ends might be just out of sight for him, but those ends still existed, if only he could hold on long enough to reach them. Not so now.

Dick was out with Damian. They had avoided each other since the fight, each interaction carefully positioned to be brief and restrained and to appear like the long gaps in between were entirely by accident. Dick asked after Tim and even sat by the bed sometimes, but his attentions were devoted to keeping Damian focused on his training. Bruce stuck mostly to Tim’s room or his own and hadn’t crossed paths with his youngest in days. Jason was true to his word. His number no longer worked. And Cass—

There was a thump upstairs. Bruce’s head snapped up. Alfred was away for his monthly poker night. The house was empty. Bruce slipped a knife from the block and went to investigate.

Upstairs he found Tim barely upright, on his knees, and clinging to the bannister overlooking the downstairs hall.

“What are you doing up?” Bruce was kneeling, too, knife abandoned on the floor, one arm bracing Tim behind the shoulders. Tim’s shirt was soaked with sweat and plastered to the knobs of his vertebrae.

“I can’t be here,” Tim was mumbling. His hands were tight on the balusters. The white of his knuckles made the bruises shine dark against his skin.

“You should be in bed.” Bruce reached to gather him up, but Tim pulled away. Bruce was surprised enough to let him. 

“I can’t _be_ here. Why am I here?” Tim crushed the heel of his palm into one eye.

“You’ve been unconscious for four days.” It was hard to say around the tightness in his throat. 

Tim flinched, surprised, but then gave his head a small shake. “Stupid,” he muttered, more to himself than Bruce.

“Come on,” Bruce tried again. He wrapped Tim up in his arms and bit back a grunt as he levered them both up into a standing position.

“Bruce, stop. I have to go.”

“Yes, to bed,” Bruce agreed.

“No, home.” They were starting to grapple now, both weak, both unwilling to hurt the other, but with determined intent. Tim wanted away, and all Bruce wanted was for him to stay.

“This is your home.”

“No, it’s not.”

Bruce had the upper hand with three weeks of rest, no rampaging infection, and a full set of internal organs. He kept a grip on Tim’s upper arms, supporting him even as he held his son in place. That grip tightened further as he said, “Yes, it is. It has been since you were fifteen. That hasn’t changed.”

“ _Everything_ has changed.” Tim ripped himself away with a heat that sent him stumbling into the bannister again. “You have no idea. You don’t want to know. _I_ don’t want you to know. I-I…”

Tim’s expression crumpled, then just as quickly he pulled himself back together, but the edges were still ripped raw. Tim took a breath. “I just wanted you back. I wanted you back, and I did it. My job is done.”

“Your place here isn’t a job.” Tim knew that. He had to know that.

Bruce hesitated, caught by his own rule. No. Protocol could stand aside, just for tonight. “I know about Robin.”

Tim’s shoulders squared. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That wasn’t my decision,” Bruce continued. “We’ll figure something out.”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

Bruce reached out again, not to restrain but to press the inside of his wrist against Tim’s forehead. Tim let him, though he kept his weight on the balls of his feet.

“You still have a fever.” Bruce left his wrist a moment longer, then swiped a thumb across the beading sweat. He wished Alfred were here. Alfred always knew what to say. “I was worried. When you didn’t come back. I was worried.”

“I’m fine.”

Bruce _hated_ that word.

“You were unconscious with a 104 fever in some random apartment,” Bruce growled.

“It wasn’t a random apartment, it’s _my_ apartment.” Tim’s jaw jutted to the side and he took a wobbling step away from Bruce and toward the stairs. “I was stupid not to use disinfectant, okay? I know. Lesson learned.”

“You’re not leaving, Timothy.”

Tim froze, his profile to Bruce, every inch of him rigid. “Yes,” he said in a low voice, “I am.”

“I say you’re not.” That was Batman, the growl, the control, the authority. It worked on every Robin that ever was, every child that had lived in this house.

Tim, shaking with fatigue, nevertheless managed to enunciate with crystal clarity, “I. Am. And you can’t stop me. I was legally emancipated four months ago. If you stop me, that’s kidnapping.”

“You—” Bruce wasn’t often speechless. He was sometimes without speech, but that was his own fault, the way words seemed to bubble and jam in the back of his throat, so that when he was silent, it was because he had too much to say but no way to say it. Now the words left him entirely, a receding of the tide.

Tim wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“You’re _sixteen_ ,” Bruce said at last.

“And you were dead.”

Tim’s gaze flicked Bruce’s direction then away. His lips were pressed thin, chin wrinkling, forehead furrowing. He shrugged, one shoulder after the other, like tripping down steps. “You were dead, Bruce. And I was dying. So I got out. And I’m seventeen now.”

Bruce struggled to breathe. The words weren’t coming.

Sometimes words weren’t good enough.

Bruce’s reflexes had not left him, not entirely. He was still faster than Tim. His hip let out a shriek as Tim bucked, but Bruce held on, hoisting the boy off the floor and into his arms.

“Bruce, stop!”

It was a father’s job to carry his children when they couldn’t make it on their own. Bruce just happened to take that promise more literally than some. Each step made his knee crunch and his back twinge and his chest ache, but he had suffered much more in hopes of ending up with much less.

“Bruce, please,” Tim said again, with less whine and more heartbreak.

Bruce nudged the detritus out of the way with his foot, kicking aside rolling poles, wastebins, and discarded linens until there was a clear path to Tim’s bed. Then he stopped, uncertain. He knew Tim. The moment Bruce put him down, Tim would try to leave again. And again. And again. And again, until one of them broke. Bruce didn’t think it would be him, but he also didn’t want Tim to break. He wanted Tim to stay, to agree to stay.

“What do you need?” Bruce asked at last.

“What?” Tim’s face was smashed into Bruce’s chest. His question came out muffled.

Bruce loosened his grip enough for Tim to lift his head, so he could look down and see his son. His back crackled. He held steady.

“What do you need?” Bruce asked again. “To stay.”

“I can’t…” Tim’s breathing was ragged at the edges, loud and frayed in the quiet room. He swallowed. “I can’t stay here when they’re here. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

They. Damian. And Dick.

Bruce had been home for three weeks, and every day broke his heart in a new way.

He bent and lowered Tim to the bed, then stepped back. There were things he could do as a father, and things he could not.

“I’ll be okay,” Tim promised quietly. He sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand against his broken nose. “I’ll be more careful, I promise. It’s okay.”

It was said man was not given more than he could bear. Bruce didn’t know if that was true. He didn’t know how much more he could bear. But, today, it seemed the answer was just a little more.

The call was brief. The penthouse was still available, with supplies ready for both day and night life. Bruce would arrange it so Alfred would deliver anything missing tomorrow, along with Damian’s kitten. There was little else to coordinate. There was little else to say.

Bruce didn’t know how much damage he had just caused or how long it would take Dick to forgive him. But he knew, of all the things he could do as a father, letting Tim leave was not one of them.

Bruce placed the phone on the end table, then fetched a clean, oversized shirt from the dresser. He squatted, the corners of his eyes wrinkling as his knees cracked and popped in protest, pulled the sweat-soaked t-shirt over Tim’s head, and let it fall to the floor.

“Arms up.” 

“Bruce?”

Bruce waited. Tim lifted his hands. Bruce pulled the fresh shirt on, then braced Tim to help him lie back on the bed. The old shirt was thrown into the laundry hamper and the water glass by the bed refreshed while Tim watched silently. When he was finished, Bruce stood by the bed and gave Tim a nudge with the back of one curled finger.

“Budge over.”

Tim blinked at him.

Bruce sighed. “I’m tired, Tim.” He rested a hand on his son’s head, palm cupped against the curve of his skull. “Make some room.”

Tim made room, and Bruce sighed again as he stretched out on the edge of the bed. The muscles in his back threatened to seize, then slowly relaxed inch by inch as he forced himself to breathe. He would find no rest tonight, which made it no different from the nights before. He couldn’t rest with his family scattered. He was so tired.

“Bruce,” Tim whispered, “are you sure?”

No. And yes. There was no right choice, no decision he could live with, not when protecting one son meant hurting another. Bruce reached across and brushed Tim’s hair back once, then again, gratified as Tim began to relax under the repetition.

“Wildflowers,” Bruce mumbled.

“Mm?”

He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“In the Watchtower,” Bruce explained quietly. “Your hair. It smelled like wildflowers. Alfred only buys strawberry.” It had bothered him, the change. It had bothered him more when he realized it was just another sign he had missed.

He pressed his nose into Tim’s hair and breathed deep. He had promised himself in the Watchtower that they would do this more, that he would make up to Tim all they had missed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “that I wasn’t here for you.”

“You’re here now. That’s what matters.”

No. _Now_ was limited. It would never be able to compensate for what he had missed. But, Bruce thought as he closed his eyes, lulled by the rhythm of Tim’s heart beating against his side, he would do what he could to make the coming days count.

And those days, those days were good. Bruce had never thought the empty days after Jason’s death were ones he would ever want to revisit, but the time after Tim’s return home felt like a second chance. They were gentle, unhurried hours, healing for them both. Bruce wasn’t quite well enough to return as Batman, and though the need to _do_ still pulled at him, it was easier to ignore the call of the city knowing that he was needed right where he was.

Tim’s fever broke and did not return. He wouldn’t tell Bruce who had stabbed him or why, just that it had happened outside of Gotham. Bruce decided not to push, for now. He did tell Bruce a little about the virtual therapy sessions Jason had forced him to start with Dinah, and Bruce made sure those sessions continued. Leslie delivered a new round of antibiotics. Tim took them at breakfast every morning as Bruce and Alfred watched.

Their time was not wholly idyllic. Dick didn’t call or answer when Bruce called him. Jason remained off the grid. Bruce’s chest continued to ache when he walked by their doors. And every glance at Tim was another reminder of how much Bruce had missed. Tim had lost the last, lingering curves of baby fat from his face, the softness stripped away by grief and an unexpected growth spurt. That same growth had lengthened him. Though Tim remained short for his age, the extra inch of height felt like a foot to Bruce. Seventeen. He had missed an entire birthday.

There wasn’t much in the way of household activities, a strange turn for two people accustomed to filling their days with problems. Some days, Tim couldn’t get out of bed, so Bruce stayed with him. Some days, Bruce found himself reading article after article of reports from when he was away—doomscrolling, Tim called it—and Tim sat slumped next to him, his attention on his own phone, the weight of him keeping Bruce grounded. They were companions in a way they hadn’t been able to be the first time around, not often speaking, but content to rest in each other’s company. And Alfred orbited around them both, silent in his own judgement, but supportive as he could be.

It might, Bruce dared to think, be okay. He didn’t know how to mend things with his other children, but if he could brace up Tim, that was a start. Hope was too big a word for what he was feeling, but it was something more than nothing.

So they kept their holding pattern, Tim healing, Bruce hoping, Alfred waiting. Until the day the call came that Damian had disappeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got stuck on this fic, started a new fic to buy myself some time, got stuck on that fic. So here I am, heelying in a month later with a smoothie and a new chapter. Only no smoothie because that would require me to go outside.


	10. Damian, again

The trick, as far as Damian was concerned, was to find the right people before the wrong people found him. And there were many wrong people to avoid.

He had a plan. He had six plans, actually, each fleshed out to varying degrees. Two had come with him to Gotham, fully formed and refined further as the days turned to months. The other four he had added as time passed, two in quick succession after the explosion and the funeral, and then two more to ease his own anxiety in the rocky months that followed. The seventh was more of a vague inclination than a plan. He had let it falter, thinking that, perhaps, it might not be needed after all.

Foolish. 

This plan was none of the original six, but rather a hybridization of two of them. Gotham, in its landlocked state, was a nuisance, and being in its heart rather than on its suburban fringes required alterations. The state of the plan’s execution allowed for changes as well. Damian had crafted his plans assuming he would be relentlessly pursued and so had built in multiple contingencies. Those would not be necessary now.

Damian slumped down on the ledge and tugged the hood low over his face as he watched the road below. The bus would arrive in fifteen minutes. It was a slower method than he would prefer, but it was a fine line he walked. The most efficient methods, like vehicle theft, would alert Batman. The faster public modes would elevate his risk of being spotted. Car services required an electronic payment, which he had but would be traceable. He had time before the eyes watching the Penthouse realized he was no longer there. All he needed to do was reach his destination before pursuit caught up with him. And, of course, there was little danger from the Penthouse itself or from the Manor.

He had very little with him. He should have had nothing. After all, he had come with nothing, so it would be fitting to leave just as empty-handed. But in the end, Damian had slipped into the pocket of his jeans a handwritten recipe card for Pennyworth’s scones and a Polaroid photo taken at the park. Everything else remained. Even his kitten. He would miss his kitten.

Fourteen minutes until the bus came. Damian wet his lips and reviewed his plan again. When the bus drove past his watchpost, he would climb down. He would board the bus and choose an advantageous seat just before departure, to deter being followed. He would ride the bus twelve stops, then board a second bus to the city limits. From there, he would take a third bus to the local nature preserve. Then he would walk. The League had an outpost northwest of the city, hidden in the foothills. If he could reach it without being detained, he would then need to convince those responsible for guarding it that it was worth their time not to kill him and to deliver him home. If one or both of these conditions were not met, he would leave a trail of bodies that would make him much easier to track, one that would require Batman to pay attention.

It would be easier for all involved if he were allowed to return without struggle.

He tried not to think about what would happen once his journey had ended.

A bus drove by. It was not his. From where he sat, he could see no suspicious activity, no skulking figures from the League or its enemies waiting to snatch him up. Damian ignored the stirring deep in his stomach, that low, uneasy murmur that maybe there was no trouble because no one at all cared if he left.

“Damian?”

The voice sent a jolt up his spine. This was not the voice he had been expecting, or had hoped for.

Damian looked between his feet, down the brick side of the building he had chosen as his perch. A man stood on the sidewalk, looking up at him, pale face bright in the moonlight and framed by a nondescript hood similar to Damian’s own.

Damien tried to gauge if he could disappear before the order came. But Father pointed a finger at him, the command clear as if he had spoken aloud.

_Stay there._

Again, there was time to calculate the repercussions—what he might avoid by leaving anyways, what consequences he might accrue by being caught a second time. Best, he thought, to wait and see what happened next. Father had no interest in making him stay, so perhaps it was merely a matter of formal dismissal. There would be punishment for improper procedure, but then nothing else would prevent Damian from leaving.

Damian pulled his legs in and sank deeper into the shadows of the brick outcropping. It took Father longer than expected to scale the inner stairwell, and when he pushed open the outer door, he was moving stiffly. Damian had seen the medical report and wondered which injury was yet unresolved, then decided he did not care. It wasn’t his place to care, not anymore. The injuries must be nearly healed now, he supposed. The Batman and Robin of the last few months would fade away, replaced and forgotten.

Father stood before him now, three or four yards away. Damian would not squirm under his scrutiny. It was the most direct attention Father had given him since his return.

“Are you alright?”

Damian blinked, caught off guard by the question. He lifted his chin. “I am uninjured.”

Why would he be hurt? He had been in no battle.

“Dick called.” Father was still studying him, his own face expressionless and unreadable. Damian could feel the weight of his study like a finger pressed against his face, dragging down his nose, across his cheek. He fought the urge to brush it away. “He went to your room and it was empty.”

Damian had spent a lot of time in his quarters at the Penthouse. Though still spacious, the Penthouse was much smaller than the Manor, making it harder to avoid Grayson. And he desperately had wanted to avoid Grayson. The wise thing to do would have been to pretend like nothing was wrong, but the exile from the Manor had come like a knife to the gut. He had failed. Father’s rejection of him was final, the mantle of Robin would return to that intruder Drake, and so much as looking at Grayson reminded Damian of the _work_ Grayson saw wasted when he looked at Damian.

Tonight had been the first night with a bright enough moon to risk the hike. Day would have been better, but he had been foolish. He had wanted to bid Gotham farewell when it looked how he remembered it best.

Father stared at him still, waiting for something. What, Damian didn’t know. The uncertainty was there again, the way Father eyed him as if he was a strange and unknowable creature. It gave Damian no power, just made him feel like a cuckoo in the nest.

“May I sit?”

Damian hated questions that didn’t require an answer. He hadn’t realized that before, not until Grayson. Grandfather and Mother both would speak rhetorically, veiling orders and punishments alike as questions. Grayson never did. When Grayson voiced a question, he would then wait until he received an answer, repeating the query if he must. It had taken Damian a long time to understand. He was still getting used to the concept, to be honest. He supposed now he never fully would.

Father lowered himself down onto the ledge with a stifled grunt closer to a sigh. They stared together out over the city. Damian wondered if they saw the same thing. If they would ever see the same thing. He had much in common with his mother, but there was still a gap between them, an undefined difference he had never fully been able to bridge. That was to be expected. Mother, in many ways, was unknowable. But he had studied Father. Researched. Sought to know him and be the best son and heir possible. And yet he had been rejected. He couldn’t tell what Father was thinking, what punishment he had planned, what would come next. Well, whatever it was, he would not flinch from it. He might be a miserable Wayne, but he was an al Ghul even still, and al Ghuls did not retreat from pain.

“How did you find me?” Damian asked at last, when it seemed Father would sit and stare for the rest of the night. _Why were you even looking? What did I do wrong?_

“It took a while,” Father admitted slowly, his eyes on the horizon. “I’m sorry. We weren’t sure what your goal was. It took longer than it should have.”

We? Did that mean Grayson was searching as well? Why? And why wasn’t he here instead of Father?

“I called Dick on my way up,” Father said, looking to Damian now. “To let him know you’d been found. He was worried.”

That should have warmed him like a cup of tea on a cold morning. It did not.

Damian scowled. “If you mean to punish me, please proceed with haste. My bus will be here in ten minutes.”

Father’s eyebrows rose. The expression made his forehead crease. The sickness in Damian’s stomach coiled over on itself. He didn’t know what that expression meant. He hated that he didn’t know.

Father looked away, down to the road below. “Where are you going?”

“Home.” Damian’s grip on the ledge tightened further. “To Mother.”

A muscle in Father’s muscle jumped, and his lips thinned as they pressed together. It was how he looked every time Damian mentioned his mother.

“Are you that unhappy here?”

Damian stiffened at the unexpected question. “Does it matter?” he asked angrily.

Father’s attention was on him fully once more. The hood shadowed his face, casting half of it into gloom, and Damian couldn’t search him for lies when he said, “Yes.”

Yes, he was unhappy. He had been unhappy from the moment he had been dropped on the Manor steps like forgotten luggage. When Father had died, he had been so sure he would be sent home. Instead, Grayson had put on the cowl and given Damian the Robin mask. And Damian had felt… not happy. Not quite. But almost like he belonged.

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t belonged anywhere. Not with his father. Not by Grayson’s side. Because he was _work_. He was a burden. And still he had held on through determination, through spite, and then Father had kicked him out of the house. Had kicked them both out of the house. Grayson would have been able to stay if it hadn’t been for Damian.

Damian said none of this. He looked out over the city instead.

“I…” Father began, then stopped.

“It is important to me,” he began again, each word a slow grind of a winch hauling thoughts up from a deep well, “that you are happy. I want you to be happy.”

“Do you?” The question fell free before he could catch it. Fear made the words come out cold and rigid, like a knifepoint. “That would require you to think of me, Father. And I doubt very much that you do.”

“I—”

Damian’s grip tightened on the ledge as the heat rose in his face. “Mother sent me here to learn from you, but you do not teach. Instead, you ignore me, and then you banish me.”

He needed to remain calm. He needed to control his tongue. But he was so _angry_ and so tired of this stupid city and its stupid rules that he didn’t understand.

“It was not my intent to hurt you,” Father said quietly, as if that mattered at all.

“You regret sending me away, then?” 

The muscle in Father’s jaw jumped again. “I… regret handling it as I did.”

“But not sending me away.” Damian’s eyes narrowed.

Father did not answer.

Damian turned, pivoting up on one knee to face him. “Even Mother had the decency to tell me to my face when she was sending me away, not hide behind a phone call like a coward.”

This was dangerous, speaking so directly, so disrespectfully. But Damian didn’t care. His eyes were burning and his face felt like it was on fire and his throat was so full of rage that it pushed everything that had been trapped within him out into the open air.

“I am your blood son and your heir. _I_ am the only other true Wayne in this city. And you choose to take my birthright from me and give it to that weakling, that impos—”

“That’s enough.”

Father did not raise his voice, but it felt like a strike to the face nevertheless. Damian cut short, breathing heavily in the sudden silence.

“Tim is my son, as are you. The Manor is his home.”

“But not mine.”

The pause that followed said enough. Eight months in Gotham, nearly six as Robin, and he could claim none of it for himself.

Fine. _Fine._ Damian stood and dusted the grit from his hands. “I will meet my bus below.”

“Damian, wait.”

Wait? Eight months he had waited and he had worked and he had _tried_. And now he had less than he had started with.

“If you’re leaving because you think I want you to—”

Damian, already partway to the rooftop door, turned back again, surprise drawing his eyebrows up.

“You do not want me in the house. You do not want me… out. You told Grayson that you will not accept me, that you will only allow that—will only allow Drake by your side. Mother may not want me either, but at least she has not lied to me.”

He needed to get away, right now, before he did or said anything else he could not control. Damian stormed to the exit, legs quivering against the impulse to sprint, and ducked into the stairwell, slamming the door shut behind him.

He would not cry. He would not cry. He would. not. cry. Grayson had said that crying was not wrong, but Grayson was a liar and an idiot. He would have to leave all of Gotham’s lies and Gotham’s weakness behind him if he would survive reentry into the League.

The bus was four minutes away. The covered overhang was empty and the area vacant. A woman and her dog passed by, its tags jingling as they passed. Damian waited until they were out of sight before sitting on the covered bench and pulling his knees up to his chest. Let the enemies of the League capture him in these remaining minutes, if they dared try. At least then he would have something else to focus on than the horrible feeling filling his chest and stomach.

That feeling only intensified when a man approached in his periphery. Father, mouth drawn into a hard, straight line, stood at the edge of the covering.

Father held up a hand before Damian could speak. The words came slowly, but surely, with no hesitation that Damian could seize upon. “I am not here to make you stay. I realize no one has asked you what you want in any of this. So if you choose to go, I will not stop you. But I ask that you do me the courtesy of hearing me out.”

Damian hesitated, wary of hidden strings, but Father said nothing. He merely stood, waiting in return, hands hidden in the front pocket of his hoodie. Damian was tempted to let him wait the full four minutes before boarding the bus, but Father had spoken to him not as a child, but as an equal. Slowly, Damian dipped his chin.

Father sat on the other end of the bench and bent forward until his elbows rested on his knees. Rather than look at Damian, he looked at his hands, the heel of his right thumb pressing into the palm of the left as he massaged the muscles there. The decision made it easier for Damian to remain still, now that he could study rather than be studied.

“I never expected to be a father,” Father began. His voice was low and sandpaper rough, as it had been ever since his return. This confession, Damian knew, was not something a parent typically confessed to offspring, and the unexpectedness of it made him lean forward slightly.

“I chose Gotham a long time ago. I chose...” Father continued, letting pauses fill in the space of what they could not speak aloud. “Dick was not a choice, not at first. I only meant to help. Even once I accepted that I could be a father to him and still do what needed to be done, I didn’t expect…”

Damian watched, fascinated and a little horrified, as Father’s throat bobbed with a hard swallow. “When… when your mother returned with you, I didn’t react well, I know. I was… upset. But it was never at you.”

Damian clicked his tongue. It had seemed like it was at him. Father nodded, as if agreeing. “I know. There are many things in my life I would change, if I could. How I acted then is one. But Damian, it was never because I didn’t want you.”

He wanted to believe that. He did. But Damian had never been one to believe in fairy tales. “I heard you. Your fight with Grayson downstairs. You were very clear.”

Father, who had returned to massaging his hand, went still as stone. “Ah,” he said at last. “I’m sorry, Damian. That is not a discussion you should have heard.”

“Fight,” Damian corrected.

Father ducked his head, mouth twisting in acknowledgement. “Fight,” he agreed. “I was angry at Dick, for how he handled things with Tim.”

“For choosing me.”

“For choosing a path that I thought caused harm to someone I love.”

That seemed clear enough. Father loved Drake, for reasons Damian couldn’t comprehend. He did not love Damian. And so he chose Drake as his Robin and his son. None of this changed Damian’s choice to leave, so he wasn’t sure why Father was wasting both their time.

Damian pulled back, attention shifting away from Father and down the road, in the direction the bus would come. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Grayson doesn’t want me either.”

“Why do you say that?”

A stupid question. “Because I heard you fighting,” Damian reminded, fingernails digging into his palms. “He said I was work. A burden.” He had thought they were partners.

“Oh sweetheart, no.” Damian stiffened, unsure what to do with the unexpected name or the warmth in his father’s voice.

“Damian. Damian, look at me.” It wasn’t an order, at least not like any order Damian had heard before. It was soft and sad and felt like fingertips under his chin, turning his head.

“I promise you, Dick does not think you’re a burden, and neither do I,” Father said. Damian had thought he would prefer Father to look at him any other way than his startled, dumb-deer stare, but this way, this sadness, it was too heavy for him to bear, especially when paired with a lie.

“I _heard_ —” he began to insist, but Father shook his head.

“I know,” Father interrupted, voice still gentle. “And I know why you interpreted it the way you did.”

He paused again, gaze drifting as he thought, and Damian hated not knowing if he was trying the best way to phrase the truth or to find a better way to lie. The bus should have been here by now. Where was his escape?

“You have a kitten,” Father said suddenly, and Damian’s heart wrenched.

He did. He had. It was a beautiful little creature with black fur and a white chest and a pink nose. It was the smallest, softest, most wonderful thing Damian had ever seen. But he had left it behind in his room, tucked into the sweatshirt it loved, with detailed instructions for its care in the hopes that Grayson would pass along those notes to whoever would keep it next. He didn’t think Grayson would turn it out onto the streets again. He hoped not. He wished he could have kept it with him, but he knew better than to bring such a fragile thing within Grandfather’s reach. Better to break his own heart now than risk his kitten’s later.

Father was still waiting for an answer, so Damian nodded, swallowing hard as he did.

“It was a stray?”

Damian nodded again.

“Did it come to you immediately, or did that trust take time?”

Father was asking questions he knew the answer to. Damian could tell, though he wasn’t sure the purpose or how Father knew to begin with. Father had been dead—presumed dead—when the kitten first came. They had never even met. Damian had been careful to keep his pet hidden in his room when Father returned, for fear he would be angry at the addition and order it away.

“It took time,” Damian answered when it became clear that Father expected a verbal response. The kitten had hissed and spat at him for some time. Damian hadn’t minded. He was so much bigger than the kitten, and it had no way of knowing he was just trying to help.

Father nodded. “It was work. Good work. Worthwhile work. But work nonetheless.” One corner of his mouth twitched, though whether it was meant to turn up or down, Damian wasn’t sure. “It took time for me with Dick. Jason and Cass as well. I don’t love them _in spite_ of the work it took. I love them, and that’s why I do the work.”

He looked to Damian again, blue eyes deep and shadowed but steady. “Do you love your kitten less, because it didn’t trust you right away?”

Damian frowned despite himself. Of course not.

“That’s why we fought, Dick and I. I ruined the trust he had worked to build between the two of you. He was angry with me, not you.”

That didn’t seem right. It was too simple. They were fighting about him, so they must be angry at him. And it didn’t explain why Father refused to accept him as Robin, why he looked at him the way he did.

“You look at me as if I am a stranger to you, or a foe,” Damian whispered.

“I know,” Father said, equally quiet. “Dick was angry at me for that, too, and he was right. He put in the work. I have not.”

His gaze remained steady on Damian’s face, and for once, it didn’t feel heavy or burdensome, just present.

“I want to be a good father,” Father said with the same deliberate slowness as before. “But I do not think that I am. Or, at least, not as good as you all deserve.”

Damian couldn’t speak to that. He just had the one father, this one, and only for very briefly. It was not what he had expected, nor had he found the experience to be enjoyable. But he couldn’t say whether the fault rested with the father or the son.

“I would like to start again, if you would let me,” Father offered. “Or, at least, give me time to try.”

It was tempting. To return to Grayson, to pretend that all would return to normal, to assume he would be able to take his rightful place at his father’s side, all of that was a powerful lure.

“Who will wear the mask?” Damian asked.

Father shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”

It hurt to hear, but at least it was the truth. Another lie would have been the end.

“Will Grayson and I be allowed back?”

“I don’t know that either.” Father’s mouth did droop then, upset deepening the lines of his face. He didn’t seem to take pleasure in the admission, but that didn’t lessen Damian’s hurt. “I made a unilateral decision for all of us, because it was the choice that needed to be made at the time. That won’t be the case now. The Manor is your home, but it is Tim’s home as well. Whatever decision is made, it will need to be settled between the four of us.”

Another hesitation, then, as Father’s lips parted and he weighed on them what he meant to say next. Damian found himself holding his breath as well. The answers he had received weren’t what he wanted, but they were the truth, at least.

“If you will consent to give me time,” Father said, picking and sorting his way through his words, “I would like to get to know you and for you to know me. I would like to… to be your father, and to earn that title, if you will let me.”

“And if I wish to return to Mother?” Damian asked.

The same muscle in Father’s jaw twitched again, but Damian could see no lie on his face when he said, “If you decide to go back to her, I’ll take you myself.”

“You don’t like her. Why?”

A strange expression pulled at Father’s face, a mixture of emotions Damian couldn’t name. “I have a hard time forgiving anyone who keeps me from my children.”

Damian held very still as Father reached out and rested one large, heavy hand gently atop his head. He could feel the warmth of his palm through his hair. “We must both learn to forgive together, mustn’t we.”

Damian didn’t know about all that. Forgiveness seemed like an unnecessary bother. But Grayson thought it important and so, it seemed, did Father. Maybe he could learn to pretend. Father dropped his hand, and Damian missed the warmth, but then Father stood with a groan and a pop of knees and held out that same hand.

“Will you come back with me?”

Damian hesitated, gaze straying back down the empty, yellow-lit road where the bus should have been. His place in Gotham was by no means secure. Father would neither promise his cape nor his home. But, if Father were to be believed, neither he nor Grayson wanted him gone, and if Damian truly wished to leave later, no barriers would be put in his way. Father would even deliver him himself, bypassing all the mess with the buses and the hiking. He had very little to lose by staying longer, and much to gain, provided he trusted Father’s promise.

He thought he might.

Damian gave a short nod and allowed Father to pull him to his feet before withdrawing his hand into his hood pocket. Father’s mouth twitched again, and this time, Damian knew he meant to smile. It wasn’t the way that Grayson smiled. When Grayson smiled, it was with his entire face—mouth and cheeks and eyes entirely transformed, radiating warmth. Father’s face barely changed at all. It was just the corners, the way the lines softened. Two different smiles, but they made Damian feel the same way.

They left the covered stop side by side, two hooded figures with synchronized steps. Damian looked back over his shoulder only once, a frown on his face.

“Problem?”

“The bus should have come ten minutes ago. What abysmal service.”

Father chuckled, the sound quiet but deep and rich from the back of his throat.

“What? What is it?”

“It’s Tuesday. That’s a Monday/Wednesday/Friday bus this month.”

Damian let out a disgruntled noise partway between a growl and a snort, making Father laugh again. Gotham was an illogical, miserable place down to its very infrastructure. Damian was still huffing in irritation when Father’s phone rang in his pocket. Father murmured an apology before answering.

One of the cars was waiting around the corner—not the work car, of course, or even one of the flashier models, but an understated four-door in dark grey paint. Damian kept an eye on Father’s face as he climbed into the passenger’s seat and buckled in. The conversation was brief, but whatever it was changed Father’s demeanor entirely.

“Yes. Yes. Right now. I can—Yes. Just keep—Yes. I’m on my way. Yes. And Clark? Thank you.”

Father was already kicking the car into gear as he ended the call.

“Father?” Damian ventured. His stomach sank as Father startled and looked down at him blankly, as if he had forgotten Damian was there at all. But then Father’s gaze sharpened and he smiled.

“I have to go out of town for a few days. Would you like to come?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I knowwwwwww. I know. But this one was incredibly hard to write and also wow 2020 has been an eon. At least it's long? These two boys are VERY hard to make talk, but once they get going, they really go. Also, the next chapter is one I've been waiting to get to literally from the beginning, so that's fun.
> 
> **ETA: Hi! There seems to be an individual having difficulties in the comments. I've reported them to AO3, as they've moved from leaving incomprehensible notes on my fic to harassing other commenters. I ask that everyone please refrain from engaging with them. It would be neither kind nor useful. I'm screenshotting and saving all comments for Staff to review.**


	11. Cass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, I warned you I had no idea where this is going. That means I also have no idea how many chapters it will take to get there. At least two more, I think.

She was on a train. It had been a long time since she had been on a train. Trains weren’t common in the United States, which she thought was stupid. Trains were good for going places. She was going places. She wasn’t sure where, but wherever it was, that’s where she was going.

Cass blinked slowly and tried not to grimace. Her eyelids felt dry and abrasive like a cat’s tongue. She had last slept. . ., She tried to count back and failed. She missed the sunglasses she used to have, the ones with massive black lenses that wrapped around her entire face like a disguise, like armor. She missed her actual armor, too. Her armguards were hidden beneath the sleeves of her hoodie, and the flexible kneepads beneath the legs of her pants, but that was all she had kept. Those were pieces that allowed her to move swiftly, silently, secretly. Those, and the knives hidden on her body and in her bag, she considered her due. The rest she left behind, along with the rest of her life.

The train’s swaying tugged on her chin, making it droop. Cass tensed and curled inward, pulling her feet up onto the seat. She would have to sleep soon, just not yet. She felt the space between her and Gotham like the hot breath of dogs at her heels. It wasn’t the distance so much as the layers, the number of false leads and switchbacks and blind alleys she had placed between herself and those she had left behind.

There weren’t enough. She knew it, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Cass tugged the lip of her hood down to lie flush with her eyelashes and did her best to keep her mind off the others. That was how she thought of them, The Others. It wasn’t that she disliked them. They were humans she had allowed in her space for some time, after all. Dick had been kind to her, all smiles—closed, once he saw how teeth made her uncomfortable—and soft tones. Tim had avoided and befriended equally, swinging wildly depending on how secure he felt, how uncomfortable she made him, how lost in his own problems he was. And Alfred, Alfred called her Miss Cassandra and hung loose sweaters with soft sleeves in her closet and stocked the pantry with her favorite seaweed chips. Even the little one, Damian, hadn’t been so bad. He had been horrible and venomous, covered in prickles that stung and scratched, but Cass knew the potency of her own defenses and the need from which they sprung. She couldn’t fault him for his. 

But they weren’t family. She had only had one family, and that was gone now.

She hadn’t stayed for the funeral. There was no need. She had seen the body. It wasn’t the first body she had ever seen, but it was the first of someone she knew. She had known it filled, glowing with life and intention, crackling full with the person she loved and trusted. And then it was broken. Empty. Alfred had cried. And she had left.

Cass didn’t think the others would come after her. They didn’t consider her family any more than she did them. They feared her. She could see it in the way they looked at her, in the careful steps they took around her, in the way their eyes clung to her when she sparred or danced. She had needed them to fear her at first, and then she hadn’t known how to make them stop. But she hoped, now that she was away, that they would be content to forget about her. They might not be her family, but they were his, and she didn’t want to hurt them if she didn’t have to.

She didn’t know what came next. She had never much need for planning, at least not more than her next meal, next rest, next moment of want. It hadn’t been a plan that sent her away, but instead the instinct that where she was was no longer safe. That was a feeling she knew well and never ignored.

So she was on a train. _A midnight train going anywhere,_ like the old song. He had liked that song, had mumble-sung it under his breath in a voice like a warbling dog when it came on the radio. The ache built in the back of her throat.

She would get off at the next stop, Cass decided. They had crossed the border three stops back. The next stop was good enough. She would get off and… and... 

Her thoughts faltered, sputtered to a halt as the train sped on. She had no _and_. Maybe she would catch another train. Or a bus. Or hitchhike. Maybe she would find a dry, secluded corner and catch a few hour’s sleep. Maybe she would find someplace she could call her own for a day, but no longer.

Cass would land on her feet. She always did. She might break an ankle or two when she hit, but she would stagger off in the direction of a new life. She would make it. She would keep going, like a train, not a silly, gas-propelled car. Another reason trains were superior. And tracks. Trains had tracks. They weren’t really going just anywhere. They always went _somewhere_. And when the tracks ended, the train stopped.

Grief, hot and suffocating and unexpected, flooded her throat and pooled in her eyes. She had thought Gotham would be her end of the line, not just a waystation. But her family was gone. Her dad was dead. And she was on a train, with every sway of the carriage taking her deeper into the night.

* * *

**Seven months later**

She was being watched. Eyes had followed her all day, skittering over her skin like sugar ants under her clothes. Cass knew she was sensitive. Though she worked to make herself invisible, it wasn’t uncommon for a stray gaze to brush against her. There were too many people in the world. She would feel their eyes pass over her like a shadow over the sun.

These eyes were different. Their gaze was neither casual nor fleeting. Someone was _watching_ her. It had built on her slowly, like pressure in the air before a storm. She had been loitering out of reach of a food cart that morning, stomach rumbling at the smell of cooking meats and simmering spices, waiting for the moment when the vendor’s back was turned and she could snatch breakfast from the bin where customers left their discards. When the fine hairs on her arms had stood on end, she thought he had spotted her, but his face was turned away. No one stared back from the crowd of waiting patrons. No amount of careful scanning had identified the watcher. Spooked, she had abandoned her meal and slipped away into the crowd. The gaze had followed.

All day the feeling had stalked her, a constant presence. It drove her mad, until she felt like hooking her fingernails beneath her skin and flaying herself bare. She couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from or if it was one person or several. A team might explain the skill, how none of her tricks seemed to work. Nothing could explain how she felt stalked in an empty room.

It was time to go anyways. She had spent nearly two weeks in the city, too long in one place. The stay had seemed important, the time she needed to finish her business, but now she knew the truth. This was her fault for growing complacent. The cost was the small cache belongings left under a carefully placed garbage heap in a back alley. It was a meager collection at best—a spare change of clothes, an extra knife, a couple trinkets. Nothing she would miss for their value, but she would regret them just the same. There was very little she could call her own, and now there was even less.

Still, worth it to escape the eyes.

She was hurrying now, threading her way through the busiest parts of the city like a mouse in tall grass. If she couldn’t lose her watcher, maybe she could confuse it long enough to make her escape. The movement, the noise, the smells, the chaos of bodies buffering each other as they hurried in all directions, it would be enough to confound any person, any machine, no matter how they chose to track her.

Cass ducked behind another food cart, then lowered herself through a loose storm grate into the city’s belly. The city was no quieter down here, the roar of transportation rumbling the walls on either side of her, but at least the layers of asphalt, concrete, and dirt dulled some of the sharp edges. Even more importantly, there was no way anyone could have seen her come here. She could follow the drain to the end, to the station, where an underground train would be waiting.

Instead, there was a man. She had looked before crawling from the drain, and he hadn’t been there. But between turning to shut the way behind her and turning back again to the disused maintenance hallway, he had appeared. He now stood watching her, empty palms lifted to show he meant no harm. As if Cass were stupid.

Hands held death, but so did keen eyes and a sharp mind, and this man had both. He stood with curved shoulders, but his body held power. And what deceit with his body could fool her now, with the weight of his gaze tracking her every twitch? This was her watcher, a stranger who had somehow tracked her across the city, through the worst she could give. He had not only followed her underground movements but had anticipated them, beating her to the train station.

The tiled floor beneath her feet rumbled as she held completely still, like a bird in the bush. She didn’t think she could disappear again. The hallway was empty. There were no weapons except what she carried with her, nowhere to hide except the grate at her back. But if she held very still, he would have nothing to read on her until the moment she decided to—

“Cassandra.”

Cass’s gaze, which had drifted over his shoulder to the potential escape beyond, snapped back to his face, sharpening to a stiletto. Blue eyes, soft but wary, held steady. They glowed as they regarded her, and Cass’s stillness broke as she recoiled.

Alien eyes. She knew them.

If Superman was here, it was by request. Who would it be? Dick, most likely, but it could be Tim. Not the little one, not unless things had changed radically in the last six months. If she was being hunted, it wasn’t for reconciliation. Was Gotham in danger? Was she the danger? Had they allowed fear of her to gnaw at their bones?

Cass’s head whipped around, seeking the real threat. A second body stood where she expected it to be, blocking the hallway from the other direction, a black shadow outlined by the flickering overhead fluorescent. Too broad for Dick, too tall for Tim, but it didn’t matter. Someone in their circle. Someone at their command.

Anger with teeth like dogs electrified her skin. She left. She surrendered Gotham to them. All she asked in return is that they leave her be, and still they sent a pawn after her. And should she fight, should she kill in self-defense, that would be her fault, not theirs, and all the more reason to trap her, capture her, keep her.

But then the shadow lowered his hood and her world went cold.

His hair was shorter than it had been last, carefully sculpted back when before he had been a week away from his next cut. The length made the silver ends shine, glimmering frost amid the dark that had been singed black or burned down to charred flesh. It would smell like strawberry now instead of smoke.

The damage was gone. She could see no bones, no burns. There was a slice across one cheekbone, already fading away into pink, healing skin. He had more wrinkles, new additions to the creases she had liked to trace with her fingertips. But she knew that face. She knew that frame.

Cass rose from her crouch. Took a step. Stopped.

“Sweetheart,” Bruce said, and she launched herself forward.

He caught her first blow on instinct, forearm blocking forearm with a power that sent echoes up into her shoulder. The second blow landed, and the third, and the fourth. Each hit felt like a weeping wound.

She didn’t realize he wasn’t fighting back until they were both on their knees. He pinned her arms to her sides, wrapped around her like a hug. It wasn’t a hug. Dead people didn’t hug.

“Cassandra—”

“No!”

He did, he smelled like strawberry and aftershave and good, clean soap.

“No!” Cass shrieked again and bashed her head wildly against his. He jerked back, sparing his nose but clipping his chin against her forehead.

The pain didn’t register. What was a papercut to an amputated limb?

“Ca—

She didn’t realize she was crying until he had pinned her arms to her side and pressed her face to his chest. It should have felt like a hug. It wasn’t meant to be.

Cass struck again, legs doing the work that arms could not. The moment’s pause was enough for her to break free, crawling backward on gritty tile until she was out of reach. Her mouth was too full, her chest too tight, and her hands shook as she raised them.

**You died. You are dead.**

**No. I—**

She turned her face away, blocking out what came next, and only turned her face back as the rest came. **I saw you.**

His face pinched in the corners, scrunching tight with regret. **I’m sorry. It wasn’t me.**

 **It was.** She had known him. Alfred had cried.

 **It wasn’t. It’s… complicated.** His fists crossed, crooked fingers passing each other but never touching. It was like inside her head, the image of the body on its table, him crouched before her now, layered but not touching.

 **You left me.** She could leave him. The presence at her back was gone, the watch lifted now with Superman’s duty fulfilled. She could run again. Instead, she stared, looking for answers in the lines of his face.

“I came back.” He said the words like they were supposed to mean something. His fingers twitched, like he was thinking of reaching for her again.

Cass’s body flinched backwards even as her screech flung forward. “LEFT.”

It was his turn to flinch. The others never believed that he did. They only saw what they wanted to see. A face of stone. A body like a door they could beat their fists against. He was their anchor point, immovable. But she could see it, not in the way that he moved but in how he didn’t, entire body bracing against a blow. In the way his eyes grew shadowed.

He flinched. She saw. And she was glad of it.

LEFT. She spat the word and flung the sign as one. She wanted to claw it into him, like nails into his skin, like every single lonely, empty day she had lived since he left her alone.

He took the blow and didn’t reach for her again. Instead, he crawled, still on his knees, to the blank hallway wall and leaned back against it. His bones crackled and popped before settling into a meditation pose. She stared, wariness twitching down her back and into the empty air behind her like a tail.

When he spoke, he didn’t look at her. His voice stayed low and steady, like the far-off rumble of thunder or the roar of the ocean. It ebbed and flowed but never stopped. He told her about his return—the confusion, the cold room, the forgetfulness. He told her where he had been, just pieces. Another place. Another time. She was too angry to hear of it right now, and he knew it. He told her how he had fought—to come back, to get her back. Of calling in a favor with a friend, and of that friend calling in favors with others, using connections fantastic and mundane to search the globe for one missing girl. Of the return call and the flight. Of careful eyes watching her through the city.

She didn’t care what he said. Words weren’t what mattered between them. The words were empty. The voice was like a slow, calming stroke down a cat’s back, soothing and settling. And the body was what mattered. The body told the truth.

They had done this before. In the beginning, he had sat against a slimy Gotham alley wall and spoke nonsense to the air as she watched from the edge of an overflowing dumpster. She hadn’t understood a single word then, but she had allowed herself to listen and to watch and to be lured until the distance closed and… there she was, next to him, a hand in his.

This time, he spoke until his voice was faded and hoarse, more grinding gears than roaring sea. And still, at the end, she found herself next to him. The wall and floor were both too cold and sent shivers up her spine, but his eyes were warm when he finally turned his head and looked down at her again.

Warm and sad and so full of the love she had missed that her own eyes welled up again in response.

He lifted one hand, palm up, asking and waiting.

Cass closed her eyes, new tears flooding already sticky cheeks, as his hand rested heavy and soft against the top of her head. When she leaned in, he gathered her close and pressed his lips to her forehead. He let her cry into the soft folds of his clean shirt, and when she hiccuped, he rubbed her back until she settled again.

“I’m so sorry, love. I’m so sorry.”

“Hate you,” she whispered, because she did, and she could, and he would let her for as long as she needed to. Already, he was nodding, chin thumping gently against her forehead.

“I know.”

“Missed you.”

“Missed you, too.”

Another solemn kiss, scratchy from the faint stubble, was placed on her forehead, then a third, by request, on her cheek.

“Home?” he asked.

She nodded. Yes. She was home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🎶 _Strangers waiting  
>  Up and down the boulevard  
> Their shadows searching in the night  
> Streetlights, people  
> Living just to find emotion  
> Hiding somewhere in the night_ 😭
> 
> The spiritual predecessor to this chapter is: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16730115/chapters/39243351 (or maybe this is the spiritual predecessor to that?)
> 
> "But didn't Dick say—" Yes. We'll get to that.
> 
> Also, as noted on other fics where Cass uses ASL, sign is not a representation of English. It is its own language and must be _translated_ into English. I am not fluent in ASL, so I'm never ever going to attempt a literal translation. Assume what she signed works with ASL's grammatical structure and vocabulary and that I made it work in English. (That said, the sign for "complicated" is direct from Google.)


	12. Alfred

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The farmers market came to Gotham once a week. Every Thursday, long before the sun cleared the smog-smudged horizon, white trucks pulled up and rolled high their doors. At 8 o’clock, the market officially opened and customers began their circuit, each choosing their preferred route suited to their tasks. Alfred Pennyworth was among them._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this before I change my mind. 😬

The farmers market came to Gotham once a week. Every Thursday, long before the sun cleared the smog-smudged horizon, white trucks pulled up and rolled high their doors. The parking lot would slowly transform from flat, empty pavement to an asphalt field of white-peaked tents. From 6:30 AM to 8:00, workers moved from truck to tent and back again, methodically constructing their little kingdoms. At 8 o’clock, the market officially opened and customers began their circuit, each choosing their preferred route suited to their tasks. Alfred Pennyworth was among them.

The vendors all knew him, quiet and kindly Mr. Pennyworth with his checked flat cap and tidy, handwritten list. A few knew with whom he was employed but most did not; none cared. He was a good customer, inclined to the best each stall had to offer and exacting in his tastes, but generous both with the change he would wave back into the till and the grandfatherly arm pats dolled out to the new workers bristling with eagerness.

Mr. Pennyworth’s routine was as regular as the turn of the proverbial clock. He began in the eastern corner of the market, both hands resting on the bar of his little pushcart. His list was a permanent fixture in his breast pocket, and he rarely deviated from it, though small treats for others in his household could prove a worthwhile temptation. He always came alone. There was no Mrs. Pennyworth. No companion to guide him by the elbow.

But some Thursdays, a young man would join him. They never came together. Sometimes the young man didn’t show at all. When he did come, he seemed to have no pattern, no set routine, but he and Mr. Pennyworth would inevitably cross paths, like two magnets on a string, and finish the rest of their shopping together.

The market was a hotbed of gossip—about each other, about new vendors, about the customers. About Mr. Pennyworth and the handsome young man who always walked just a half-step behind, as if Mr. Pennyworth were a treasure that needed guarding from the rest of the market, or as if the man’s shadow wasn’t a close enough position to spend time together.

Alfred, for his part, didn’t know the initial direction of the gossip. He was aware of the benign curiosity of the market, but he didn’t notice the satisfied pursing of the baker’s mouth the first time he introduced his companion as _my grandson, Jay._ No, he was too busy pretending not to notice the flush coloring the tips of Jason’s ears. That introduction had come many months into their not-quite-happenstance meetings. He hadn’t wanted to risk scaring the boy off. The first time their paths had crossed, Jason had withdrawn from Gotham entirely for a full three weeks. Even now, well into their established routine, Alfred was never certain if his Thursday would include company. Jason came and went as he felt comfortable, as he had time, as his relationship with the others evolved or devolved. And so, as Jason was unpredictable, Alfred made sure he was entirely predictable. His reward was a presence at his elbow and the peace of mind that, for this week at least, he had staved off another loss.

Although it appeared that his losses nowadays were not so final as they had once been. His family, once seemingly fractured beyond repair, had its missing pieces restored and was slowly beginning to mend. Alfred smiled to himself as he placed the bag of homemade lemon drops in his pushcart. Cassandra, that dear girl, would be home soon, and sour things had a knack of bringing a smile to that sweet face. With that task done, and a wrapped caramel deftly slipped into Jason’s jacket pocket, Alfred moved along to the next vendor.

Jason followed silently. He always had been a quiet boy. All of the children could be quiet, of course, sometimes unnaturally so, as their work demanded. But when granted individual time, the others tended to talk. Dick was a chatterbox, good-natured and bright, his ambling speech a way of indicating that he was happy you were here. Damian, that prickly child, tended to speak in demands and boasts, though Alfred was not completely blind to the eagerness to please that lurked underneath. Timothy, who was often painfully reticent in a group setting, seemed to split at the seams at the relief of undivided attention. Alfred had had little time to discover what Cassandra was like alone. But Jason, Jason above all the others was content to wait, to be, to soak in the presence of another like a healing balm.

At any rate, silence was safest, most of the time. Jason’s relationships with the others were contentious. Alfred did what he could to float above the churn. He had no way of knowing when a truce would abruptly crack like a rotting limb beneath his feet, or, more rarely, when a bitter divide would spontaneously heal. The animosity between Jason and Timothy, for example, was longstanding, but had undergone some mending over the last several months. Alfred hadn’t known. It seemed there was much he hadn’t known.

“A party?” Jason asked drily as he accepted the wrapped rack of lamb from the vendor and set it gently in Alfred’s basket.

“A homecoming,” Alfred replied. Questions were rare between them, at least of the probing sort, and he picked carefully over what else to add. The truth, for the moment, seemed safe enough. “Master Bruce and young Master Damian will be returning from overseas this evening, along with Miss Cassandra. The lamb is for tomorrow.”

“Thought the brat didn’t eat meat.”

“He doesn’t. There will be salad, risotto, and a mushroom wellington as well.” Another careful consideration. “Besides, I am not sure if Master Damian will be joining us.”

“Oh? B finally get tired of his mouth and chuck him out?”

Alfred’s lips pursed, but he kept the line of his shoulders straight and at ease as he stopped at another stand and eyed their peppers. Jason, when he did speak, had a tendency to prod for a reaction. He was, in many ways, still a child in a man’s body.

“Master Dick has taken him to live in the penthouse,” Alfred explained with an ease he did not feel.

Jason snorted. “Figures. Everyone’s gotta take their turn on the outs, right?” He quieted for a moment, his hands—the only part of him Alfred could see in his periphery—stilling before he murmured, “Good for the kid, though.”

Then the hands tightened into fists and Jason turned away to busy himself with the tomatoes. It was a slow breath on Alfred’s part that finally linked _kid_ to _Timothy._ Damian was always “the brat” or “the gremlin.” Timothy had always been “the replacement,” a designation that made Alfred feel like he was kneeling graveside again and again. If Timothy had been downgraded to “kid,” a term that was almost affectionate in nature, perhaps a genuine reconciliation was on the horizon.

“Blueberries,” Alfred decided aloud, even as he planned his next delicate foray. “For blueberry lemon tarts.”

A small jar of apricot preserves appeared before him, held aloft in Jason’s hand. Alfred’s lips twitched into a smile. He placed the jar in his basket. “You recall the recipe.”

Jason shrugged and pointed across to where the blueberries waited as he said, “We made it together the summer I broke my arm. You taught me how to crack an egg one-handed.”

Alfred remembered that summer in a hazy, golden way, though it hadn’t felt so at the time. The official story was that Jason had broken his arm falling off his bike. The true story involved a fall from a much greater height. It had been no one’s fault, other than the criminal Bruce and Jason had been chasing at the time, but the injury had felt—as all field injuries felt—like a blow to the chest. Alfred knew that his family had each come to their chosen double life of their own volition. Even as a child, Jason could have been dissuaded no more than Bruce himself. Better to let him go with supervision and the full might of the Bat Cave’s technology protecting him. But each injury, large or small, was a reminder of how fragile they all were, how close to disaster they danced.

Jason had been benched for six weeks to heal and recover. Alfred had stepped in to fill the void left by nightly duties, having learned from Dick’s childhood not to assume obedience without enticement. They were goodhearted children who wanted to help, to protect. One fractured ulna would not diminish that drive. Kitchen lessons were one such tool in Alfred’s kit, and together they had spent the summer working their way through an assortment of old family recipes and meal staples. Alfred had cherished those sunny afternoons together. More so, after Jason’s death.

“They are Master Timothy’s favorite,” Alfred explained, voice still hushed by the memories. He dusted himself off internally, straightened his shoulders, and lifted a small container of blueberries for inspection. “He is unlike you or Master Dick. He must be tempted to eat. And so I tempt.”

Jason grunted. That was a better reaction than Alfred had dared hope for. He considered the conversation peaceably ended by that grunt, so he was surprised when, after a silence, Jason spoke quietly from behind him.

“He’ll eat Thai.”

Alfred hummed, an acknowledgement without an interruption as the information was carefully filed away. He waited, gaze fixed on the deep blue berries, fingers busy but focus latched onto the boy behind him. Nothing more came. Alfred took a risk.

“He was in poor shape when he arrived. I hear that without you, he would have been much worse.”

“Alf…”

They were both turned now, produce and pretense abandoned, though Jason’s gaze stayed on his hands, his shoes, anywhere but Alfred’s face. This was uncomfortable for him, for both of them. They were on fragile ground, the space between them mined with too many forbidden subjects. Neither wanted to fracture their peace.

But Alfred had stood over too many graves. And after every loss, every devastation, he had told himself _Never again._

A woman, hemp tote swinging with the weight of her purchases, jostled them both on her way past. Alfred reached out and snagged his grandson’s elbow. Jason let him, then followed when Alfred gestured to a quiet spot behind the tents, away from the lazy bustle of the market.

“I have buried too many,” Alfred began, voice low and pitched for his companion’s ears only as they walked. “I could not have borne another loss, not… not so soon after…”

It would have killed him. To lose a boy like Tim so soon after losing Bruce, it would have killed Alfred. He had already felt like he was dying day by day, the grief wearing on him like water on rock. Only the belief that he was needed had kept him going.

There was a bench. This time it was Jason’s turn to lead, to guide with hesitant fingertips. Alfred was grateful for the opportunity to sit before he collapsed. He was strong, so strong, because he had to be, but that fathomless abyss, that what-could-have-been, was still so close. If he stood too near, the gravity of it would tear him asunder.

Alfred’s eyes burned. He waited. He breathed. Jason sat beside him, not touching but waiting as well. He needed to conclude this moment and return to shopping. Jason was much like Bruce in that his willingness to shoulder a burden for those he loved never ceased to astound Alfred. But that willingness was not without limit, and an emotional moment such as this one was indeed a burden. Push too far and Alfred risked driving the boy away, perhaps for good. That, in itself, would be another kind of death. But Alfred needed to know.

When he spoke again, Alfred was relieved to find his voice bricked steady once more, even as the words crowded and pushed at the base of his throat. “Did Timothy ever say why he went to you?”

Jason made a noise, a soft sort of huff, but Alfred hurried on before he could be misinterpreted. Timothy’s reasons for seeking out Jason were his own, and they were Timothy’s to tell. That wasn’t what Alfred wished to understand. “Did he say why… why I was not an option?”

There were many unknowns that haunted Alfred, and this was one. Bad enough that Timothy would come so close to death’s door without Alfred knowing, but why had it ever come to that point? Alfred had thought he had earned some modicum of affection, of trust. He loved that boy as if Timothy were his own flesh and blood. He would have died for him, willingly. So what had struck out Alfred as a potential source of aid?

Alfred risked a glance at Jason’s face. If a lie was imminent, even if meant in kindness, he wished to catch it. So he watched as the boy’s creased into a grimace, though one of hurt or reluctance, he couldn’t be sure. It was only when Jason spoke, gravelly voice soft with hesitance, that Alfred could put a name to the confusion that lined his face.

“He said Dick picked the gremlin over him.”

It was not the place to correct the label, to remind Jason that Damian was just a boy with a name of his own. Nor was there the emotional stability to correct Timothy’s perception of events. He would see it that way, as Dick choosing Damian over him instead of Dick doing his best to limit worst possible outcomes. Dick had been grieving—they all had been—and Damian had been in desperate need of a purpose to rein in his more destructive tendencies. Perhaps they had placed too much faith in Timothy’s dependability.

“That does not answer my question.”

Jason’s face seemed to further compress in confusion.

“ _Dick_ forced him out,” Jason said, placing particular stress on the name. For once, it didn’t seem that the stress was supposed to denote insult.

“And I am not Master Dick.”

“No, but we all know—”

Jason’s teeth clicked, snapping shut to trap the rest of whatever had nearly followed.

“What is it you know?” Alfred prodded gently.

That was frustration making the muscle in Jason’s cheek jump, Alfred thought distantly. It was certainly frustration that turned the boy’s head, forcing his gaze away, into the unchallenging distance.

“Jason?”

“He’s not angry at you.” Jason’s voice was almost pleading, all posturing stripped away. “I’m not either, Al, honest. I was. I used to be. But I swear I’m not now. We all get it, okay?”

“Cease with the riddles, please.” He felt dazed, winded by the compounding words that meant nothing but seemed to be building to something. Perhaps he shouldn’t have asked, Alfred thought briefly. But he had, and now he was to learn.

Jason’s hands clenched and unclenched on his knees, tendons straining. “You raised Bruce. His parents hired you, and then it was just you and him. You’re the Wayne butler and you’re his family. He comes first. He always comes first. Even before us.” 

That… that wasn’t right. Alfred didn’t—Yes, Bruce’s wellbeing was important to him, but he…

It felt like a single light blinking steadily in Alfred’s head, a point he was trying to crawl his way to in unrelenting darkness. Because what Jason was saying wasn’t right, and besides—

“Master Bruce was dead,” Alfred breathed, a stumbling block in his path in the dark. They were speaking of Timothy and of Dick, not a man Alfred had thought was lost forever.

“And Dick was first,” Jason finished. “With Bruce out of the picture, you back Dick. Or maybe Damian as the blood son, but either way, the result’s the same.”

“No. No, that isn’t…” Alfred tried to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry. “If he had reached out to me, I would have…”

“You’d have to ask him,” Jason said in a low voice, “but I got the impression that that wasn’t something he could risk.”

To be rejected again, he meant. To be turned away by another member of his family. For Timothy, Alfred wouldn’t have been a place of safety but merely another potential blow to weather.

No. Jason was wrong. He had to be wrong. There had to be another explanation. He would return to the Manor and ask. Maybe if aided by freshly baked tarts, he could tempt the truth from Timothy.

The silence proved too much for Jason, who stood abruptly. “I, uh, got some things to take care of, so I should head out. I’ll drop some cash with Luz for those blueberries on my way.”

Alfred’s hand snaked out and pinched Jason’s sleeve between his fingertips, stopping him before he could walk away.

“You didn’t come home,” Alfred said. His heart pounded in his chest. It seemed that once he allowed himself to push for answers, there was no stopping. “We thought Bruce was dead. You claim to stay away because of him, but he was gone. Why did you not come home?”

He looked old, this boy. At times, Alfred could still see the child he had been, awkward and unsure and still so eager for all that life had to offer. But now, as Jason stared down at him and grief as stark and heavy as a gathering storm lay across his face, Jason looked too old for his years.

“We’re past that, Alf. We have been for a long time.” Jason’s hand rested on Alfred’s, then gently lifted his fingers free of the sleeve. “And you never asked.”

Alfred remained on the bench for a long time, his hands clutched in his lap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you all have ANY IDEA how HARD it is to get Jason Todd and Alfred Pennyworth to talk about FEELINGS???? DO YOU????? Ugh. Anyways, thanks to everyone for your patience. I hope you enjoy this chapter, because I predict the next one is going to be just as hard.


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